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GREENWICH VILLAGE 



By 
ANNA ALICE CHAPIN 

Author of " Wonder Tales from Wagner,' 
" Masters of Music," etc. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
ALLAN GILBERT CRAM 





B 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1917 



28 

.Lnl 

GsC4 



Copyright, igi7, by 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 



HOV 15 1317 



■ 



To 

Vincent Pepe, 

Who First Suggested the Writing of It, 
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Chequered History of a City Square . 3 

II The Green Village 35 

III The Gallant Career of Sir Peter Warren 71 

IV The Story of Richmond Hill .... 103 
V " Tom Paine, Infidel " 145 

VI Pages of Romance 173 

VII Restaurants, and the Magic Door . . 209 

VIII Villagers . 243 

IX And then More Villagers 269 

A Last Word 299 



ILLUSTRATIONS 















^ron 


hspiecc 


Map of Old Greenwich Village . 


FACING 
PAGE 

T 


Oldest Building on the Square . 












24 


Jefferson Market 












38' 


The Cradle of Bohemia 














60' 


Old St. John's . 














82 


Washington Arch 














108 


The Butterick Building 














130 


59 Grove Street . 














148 


Grove Court 














164 


The Brevoort House . 














180 


Grove Street 














198 


The Dutch Oven 














224 


Patchin Place 














246 


Washington Square South 














. 258 


Macdougal Alley 














276 


A Greenwich Studio . 














. 290 



A FIRST WORD 

" 'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls," — 
and, to my mind, Greenwich Village has a very 
personal soul that requires very personal and 
very careful handling. This little foreword is 
to crave pardon humbly if my touch has not 
been light, or deft, or sure. There are so many 
things that I may have left out, so many ways 
in which I must have erred. 

And I want to thank people too, — just here. 
So many people there are to thank! I cannot 
simply dismiss the matter with the usual acknowl- 
edgment of a list of authorities — to which, by 
the bye, I have tried to cling as though they were 
life-buoys in a stormy sea of research! 

There are the kindly individuals, — J. H. 
Henry, Vincent Pepe, William van der Weyde, J. 
B. Martin, and the rest, — who have so generously 
placed their own extensive information and col- 
lected material at my disposal. And there are 
the small army of librarians and clerks and secre- 
taries and so on, who have given me unlimited 
patience and most encouraging personal interest. 

And finally, beyond all these, are the Villagers 
who have taken me in, and made me welcome, 

-*- ix h- 



A FIRST WORD 

and won my heart for all time. Everyone has 
been so kind that my " thank you " must take 
in all of Greenwich. 

It is said that hospitality, neighbourliness and 
genuine cordiality are traits of any well-conducted 
village. Then be sure that our Village in the city 
is not behind its rustic fellows. For, wherever 
you stray or wherever you stop within its confines, 
you will always find the latch-string hung out- 
side. 



-«- X-J- 



" Does a bird need to theorise about building 
its nest, or boast of it when built? All good work 
is essentially done that way — without hesitation, 
without difficulty, without boasting. . . . And 
now, returning to the broader question, what these 
arts and labours of life have to teach us of its 
mystery, this is the first of their lessons — that the 
more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially 
the work of people who . . . are striving for 
the fulfilment of a law, and the grasp of a loveli- 
ness, which they have not yet attained. . . . 
Whenever the arts and labours of life are fulfilled 
in this spirit of striving against misrule, and doing 
whatever we have to do, honourably and per- 
fectly, they invariably bring happiness, as much 
as seems possible to the nature of man." 

—John Ruskin. 



The Chequered History of a 
City Square 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 



CHAPTER I 

The Chequered History of a City Square 

... I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of 
early association, but this portion of New York appears to 
many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established 
repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of 
the long, shrill city ; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look 
than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal 
thoroughfare — the look of having had something of a social 
history. — Henry James (in "Washington Square"). 

HERE is little in our busy, modern, 
progressive city to suggest Father 
Knickerbocker, with his three-cornered 
hat and knee-breeches, and his old- 
world air so homely and so picturesque. Our 
great streets, hemmed by stone and marble and 
glittering plate glass, crowded with kaleido- 
scopic cosmopolitan traffic, ceaselessly resonant 
with twentieth century activity, do not seem 
a happy setting for our old-fashioned and be- 
loved presiding shade. Where could he fall 
a-nodding, to dream himself back into the quaint 




GREENWICH VILLAGE 

and gallant days of the past? Where would he 
smoke his ancient Dutch pipe in peace? One 
has a mental picture of Father Knickerbocker 
shaking his queued head over so much noise and 
haste, so many new-fangled, cluttering things 
and ways, such a confusion of aims and pursuits 
on his fine old island! And he would be a 
wretched ghost indeed if doomed to haunt only 
upper New York. But it happens that he has 
a sanctuary, a haven after his own heart, where 
he can still draw a breath of relief, among 
buildings small but full of age and dignity and 
with the look of homes about them; on restful, 
crooked little streets where there remain trees 
and grass-plots; in the old-time purlieus of Wash- 
ington Square and Greenwich Village! 

The history of old New York reads like a 
romance. There is scarcely a plot of ground 
below Fourteenth Street without its story and 
its associations, its motley company of memories 
and spectres both good and bad, its imperish- 
ably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned 
in the dry prose of registries and records. Let 
us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it 
were, of that region which we now know as 
Washington Square, as it was when the city of 
New York bought it for a Potter's Field. 

Perhaps you have tried to visualise old New 
-*- 4 -*• 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

York as hard as I have tried. But I will wager 
that, like myself, you have been unable to con- 
jure up more than a nebulous and tenuous 
vision, — a modern New York's shadow, the 
ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today. 
For instance, when you have thought of old 
Washington Square, you have probably thought 
of it pretty much as it is now, only of course 
with an old-time atmosphere. The whole 
Village, with all your best imaginative efforts, 
persists — does it not? — in being a part of New 
York proper. 

It was not until I had come to browse among 
the oldest of Manhattan's oldest records, — (and 
at that they're not very old!) — those which show 
the reaching out of the fingers of early progress, 
the first shoots of metropolitan growth, that the 
picture really came to me. Then I saw New 
York as a little city which had sprung up almost 
with the speed of a modern mushroom town. 
First, in Peter Minuit's day, its centre was the 
old block house below Bowling Green; then it 
spread out a bit until it became a real, thriving 
city, — with its utmost limits at Canal Street! 
Greenwich and the Bowery Lane were isolated 
little country hamlets, the only ones on the island, 
and far, far out of town. They appeared as in- 
accessible to the urban dwellers of that day as do 

-e-5-2- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

residents on the Hudson to the confirmed city 
people nowadays; — nay, st.ill more so, since trains 
and motors, subways and surface cars, have more 
or less annihilated distance for us. 

Washington Square was then in the real wilds, 
an uncultivated region, half swamp, half sand, 
with the Sand Hill Road, — an old Indian trail, — 
running along the edge of it, and Minetta Creek 
taking its sparkling course through its centre. 
It was many years before Minetta was even 
spanned by a bridge, for no one lived anywhere 
near it. 

Peter Stuyvesant's farm gave the Bowery its 
name, for you must know that Bouwerie came 
from the Dutch word Bouwerij, which means 
farm, and this country lane ran through the 
grounds of the Stuyvesant homestead. A branch 
road from the Bouwerie Lane led across the 
stretch of alternate marsh and sand to the tiny 
settlement of Greenwich, running from east to 
west. The exact line is lost today, but we know 
it followed the general limit of Washington 
Square North. On the east was the Indian trail. 

Sarah Comstock says: 

" The Indian trail has been, throughout our 
country, the beginning of the road. In his turn, 
the Indian often followed the trail of the beast. 
Such beginnings are indiscernible for the most 

•+- 6 -J- 



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wo miles 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

part, in the dusk of history, but we still trace 
many an old path that once knew the tread of 
moccasined feet." 



Here, between the short lane that ran from the 
Bouwerij toward the first young sprout of Green- 
wich, and the primitive Sand Hill (or Sandy 
Hill) Trail lay a certain waste tract of land. It 
was flanked by the sand mounds, — part of the 
Zantberg, or long range of sand hills, — haunted 
by wild fowl, and utterly aloof from even that 
primitive civilisation. The brook ffowed from 
the upper part of the Zantberg Hills to the Hud- 
son River, and emptied itself into that great chan- 
nel at a point somewhere near Charlton Street. 
The name Minetta came from the Dutch root, — 
min, — minute, diminutive. With the popular 
suffix tje (the Dutch could no more resist that 
than the French can resist ette!) it became Mintje, 
— the little one,— to distinguish it from the Groote 
Kill or large creek a mile away. It was also 
sometimes called Bestavaars Killetje, or Grand- 
father's Little Creek, but Mintje persisted, and 
soon became Minetta. 

Minetta was a fine fishing brook, and the ad- 
jacent region was full of wild duck; so, take it 
all in all, it was a game preserve such as sports- 
men love. It seems that the old Dutch settlers 

-j- 7 -?- 




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MAP OF OLD GREENWICH VILLAGE 

A section of Bernard Ratzer's map of New York and its suburbs, made in 

the Eighteenth Century, when Greenwich was more than two miles 

from the city 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

were fond of hunting and fishing, for they came 
here to shoot and angle, as we would go into — 
let us say — the Adirondacks or the Maine woods! 

" A high range of sand hills traversed a part 
of the island, from Varick and Charlton to Eighth 
and Green streets," says Mary L. Booth, in her 
history. " To the north of these lay a valley 
through which ran a brook, which formed the 
outlet of the springy marshes of Washington 
Square. ..." 

And here, on the self-same ground of those 
" springy marshes," is Washington Square today. 

The lonely Zantberg, — the wind-blown range 
of sand hills; the cries of the wild birds breaking 
the stillness; the quietly rippling stream winding 
downward from the higher ground in the north, 
and now and then, in the spring of the year, 
overflowing its bed in a wilderness of brambles 
and rushes; — do these things make you realise 
more plainly the sylvan remoteness of that part 
of New York which we now know as Downtown? 

A glance at Bernard Ratzer's map — made in 
the beginning of the last half of the eighteenth 
century for the English governor, Sir Henry 
Moore — shows the only important holdings in the 
neighbourhood at that time: the Warren place, the 
Herrin (Haring or Harring) farm, the Eliot 
estate, etc. The site of the Square, in fact, was 

-j-8 -+ 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

originally composed of two separate tracts and 
had two sources of title, divided by Minetta 
Brook, which crossed the land about sixty feet 
west of where Fifth Avenue starts today. West- 
ward lay that rather small portion of the land 
which belonged to the huge holdings of Sir Peter 
Warren, of whom more anon. 

The eastern part was originally the property 
of the Herrings, Harrings or Herrins, — a family 
prominent among the early Dutch settlers and 
later distinguished for patriotic services to the 
new republic. They appear to have been directly 
descended from that intrepid Hollander, Jan 
Hareng of the city of Hoorn, who is said to have 
held the narrow point of a dike against a thou- 
sand Spaniards, and performed other prodigious 
feats of valour. In the genealogical book I 
read, it was suggested that the name Hareng 
originated in some amazingly large herring catch 
which (I quote verbatim from that learned book) 
" astonished the city of Hoorn," — and henceforth 
attached itself to the redoubtable fisherman! 

The earliest of the family in this city was one 
Jan Pietersen Haring, and his descendants worked 
unceasingly for the liberty of the republic and 
against the Tory party. In 1748, Elbert Haring 
received a grant of land which was undoubtedly 
the farm shown in the Ratzer map. A tract of 

-*- 9 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

it was sold by the Harring (Herring) family to 
Cornelius Roosevelt; it passed next into Jacob 
Sebor's hands, and in 1795 was bought by 
Col. William S. Smith, a brilliant officer in Wash- 
ington's army, and holder of various posts of 
public office. 

There was a Potter's Field, a cemetery for the 
poor and friendless, far out in the country, — i.e, 
somewhere near Madison Square, — but it was 
neither big enough nor accessible enough. In 
1789, the city decided to have another one. The 
tract of land threaded by Minetta Water, half 
marsh and half sand, was just about what was 
wanted. It was retired, the right distance from 
town and excellently adapted to the purposes of 
a burying ground. The ground, popular his- 
torians to the contrary, was by no means uni- 
formly swampy. When filled in, it would, 
indeed, be dry and sandy, — the sandy soil of 
Greenwich extends, in some places, to a depth 
of fifty feet. Accordingly, the city bought the 
land from the Herrings and made a Potter's Field. 
Eight years later, by the bye, they bought Colonel 
Smith's tract too, to add to the field. The entire 
plot was ninety lots, — eight lots to an acre, — and 
comprised nearly the entire site of the present 
square. The extreme western part, a strip ex- 
tending east of Macdougal Street to the Brook, a 

-e- 10 -*- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

scant thirty feet, — was bought from the Warren 
heirs. 

Minetta Lane, which was close by, had a few 
aristocratic country residents by that time, and 
every one was quite outraged by the notion of 
having a paupers' graveyard so near. Several 
rich people of the countryside even offered to 
present the city corporation with a much larger 
and more valuable plot of ground somewhere 
else; but the officials were firm. The public 
notice was relentlessly made, of the purchase of 
ground " bounded on the road leading from the 
Bowerie Lane at the two-mile stone to Green- 
wich." 

When you next stroll through the little quiet 
park in the shadow of the Arch and Turini's great 
statue of Garibaldi, watching the children at 
play, the tramps and wayfarers resting, the tired 
horses drinking from the fountain the S. P. C. A. 
has placed there for their service and comfort, 
the old dreaming of the past, and the young 
dreaming of the future, — see, if you please, if it 
is not rather a wistfully pleasant thought to re- 
call the poor and the old and the nameless and 
the humble who were put to rest there a century 
and a quarter ago? 

The Aceldama of the Priests of Jerusalem was 
" the potter's field to bury strangers in," accord- 

■4- II -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

ing to St. Matthew; and in the Syriac version 
that meant literally " the field of sleep." It is 
true that when they made use of Judas Iscariot's 
pieces of silver, they twisted the syllables to 
mean the " field of blood," but it was a play 
upon words only. The Field of Sleep was the 
Potter's Field, where the weary " strangers " 
rested, at home at last. 

There is nothing intrinsically repellent in the 
memories attached to a Potter's Field, — save, pos- 
sibly, in this case, a certain scandalous old story 
of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the 
medical students of the town. That was a dis- 
graceful business if you like! But public feeling 
was so bitter and retributive that the practice 
was speedily discontinued. So, again, there is 
nothing to make us recoil, here among the green 
shadows of the square, from the recollection of 
the Potter's Field. But there is always something 
fundamentally shocking in any place of public 
punishment. And, — alas! — there is that stain 
upon the fair history of this square of which we 
are writing. 

For — there was a gallows in the old Potter's 
Field. Upon the very spot where you may be 
watching the sparrows or the budding leaves, 
offenders were hanged for the edification or in- 
timidation of huge crowds of people. Twenty 

-*- 12 -+■ 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

highwaymen were despatched there, and at least 
one historian insists that they were all executed 
at once, and that Lafayette watched the per- 
formance. Certainly a score seems rather a large 
number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; 
one cannot help wondering if the event were pre- 
sented to the great Frenchman as a form of enter- 
tainment. 

In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring 
epidemics of yellow fever which used to devastate 
early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a worse one. 
Many bodies were brought from other burying 
grounds, and when the scourge of smallpox killed 
off two thousand persons in one short space, six 
hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in 
this particular public cemetery. During one very 
bad time, the rich as well as the poor were 
brought there, and there were nearly two thou- 
sand bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field. 

People who had died from yellow fever were 
wrapped in great yellow sheets before they were 
buried, — a curious touch of symbolism in keep- 
ing with the fantastic habit of mind which we 
find everywhere in the early annals of America. 
Mr. E. N. Tailer, among others, can recall, many 
years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of 
shrouds uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when 
the heavy guns placed in the Square sank too 

■+-I3-J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

weightily into the ground, and crushed the trench- 
vaults. 

It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, 
those lost and sometimes non-existent headstones 
of the Field, — that is, to try to tell a few of the 
tales that cling about those who were buried 
there. But the task is difficult, and after all, 
tombstones yield but cheerless reading. That 
the sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had 
not even that shelter of tombstones makes their 
stories the more elusive and the more melancholy. 
One or two slight records stand out among the 
rest, notably the curious one attached to the last 
of the stones to be removed from Washington 
Square. I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr. 
John Francis, in an address before the Historical 
Society of New York, told this odd story, which 
must here be only touched upon. 

One Benjamin Perkins, " a charlatan believer in 
mesmeric influence," plied his trade in early Man- 
hattan. He seems to have belonged to that vast 
army of persons who seriously believe their own 
teachings even when they know them to be pre- 
posterous. Perkins made a specialty of yellow 
fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hyp- 
notism. That he had a following is in no way 
strange, considering his day and generation, but 
the striking point about this is that, when he was 

•+- 14 h- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

exposed to the horror himself, he tried to auto- 
mesmerise himself out of it. After three days he 
died, as Dr. Francis says, " a victim of his own 
temerity." 

And still the gallows stood on the Field of Sleep, 
and also a big elm tree which sometimes served 
as the " gallows tree." Naturally, Indians and 
negroes predominated in the lists of malefactors 
executed. The redmen were distrusted from the 
beginning on Manhattan, — and with some basic 
reason, one must admit; — as for the blacks, they 
were more severely dealt with than any other 
class. The rigid laws and restrictions of that day 
were applied especially rigidly to the slaves. A 
slave was accounted guilty of heavy crimes on 
the very lightest sort of evidence, and the penal- 
ties imposed seem to us out of all proportion to 
the acts. Arson, for instance, was a particularly 
heinous offence — when committed by a negro. 
The negro riots, which form such an exceedingly 
black chapter in New York's history, and which 
horrify our more humane modern standards with 
ghastly pictures of hangings and burnings at the 
stake, were often caused by nothing more crim- 
inal than incendiarism. One very bad period of 
this sort of disorder started with a trifling fire in 
Sir Peter Warren's house, — the source of which 
was not discovered, — and later grew to ungovern- 

-j- 15 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

able proportions through other acts of the same 
sort. 

As late as 1819, a young negro girl named Rose 
Butler was hanged in our Square before an im- 
mense crowd, including many women and young 
children. Kindly read what the New York 
Evening Post said about it in its issue of July 9th: 

" Rose, a black girl who had been sentenced to 
be hung for setting fire to a dwelling house, and 
who was respited for a few days, in the hope 
that she would disclose some accomplice in her 
wickedness, was executed yesterday at two o'clock 
near the Potter's Field." 

And in Charles H. Haswell's delightful 
" Reminiscences," there is one passage which has, 
for modern ears, rather too Spartan a ring: 

" A leading daily paper referred to her (he 
speaks of Rose) execution in a paragraph of five 
lines, without noticing any of the unnecessary 
and absurd details that are given in the present 
day in like cases; neither was her dying speech 
recorded. ..." 

Thomas Janvier declares that she was accused 
of murder, but all other authorities say that poor 
Rose's " wickedness " had consisted of lighting a 

-*- 16 -f- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

fire under the staircase of her master's house, 
with, or so it was asserted, " a malicious intent." 
One sees that it was quite easy to get hanged in 
those days, — especially if you happened to be a 
negro! The great elm tree, on a branch of which 
Rose was hanged, stood intact in the Square until 
1890. I am glad it is gone at last! 

Old Manhattan was as strictly run as discipli- 
nary measures and rules could contrive and guar- 
antee. The old blue laws were stringently en- 
forced, and the penalty for infringement was 
usually a sharp one. In the unpublished record 
of the city clerk we find, next to the item that 
records Elbert Harring's application for a land- 
grant, a note to the effect that a " Publick Whip- 
per " had been appointed on the same day, at five 
pounds quarterly. 

Public notices of that time, printed in the cur- 
rent press, remind the reader of some of these 
aforementioned rules and regulations. We read 
that " Tapsters are forbid to sell to the Indians," 
and that " unseasonable night tippling " is also 
tabooed; likewise drinking after nine in the eve- 
ning when curfew rings, or " on a Sunday before 
three o'clock, when divine service shall be over." 

I wonder whether little old " Washington 
Hall " was built too late to come under these 
regulations? It was a roadhouse of some repute 

-*- 17 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

in 1820, and a famous meeting place for celeb- 
rities in the sporting world. It was, too, a 
tavern and coffee house for travellers (its punch 
was famous!) and the stagecoaches stopped there 
to change horses. At this moment of writing it 
is still standing, on the south of Washington 
Square, — I think number 58, — with other shabby 
structures of wood, which, for some inscrutable 
reason, have never been either demolished or im- 
proved. Now they are doomed at last, and are 
to make way for new and grand apartment 
houses; and so these, among the oldest buildings 
in Greenwich, drift into the mist of the past. 

And in that same part of the Square — in num- 
ber 59 or 60, it is said — lived one who cannot 
be omitted from any story of the Potter's Field: 
Daniel Megie, the city's gravedigger. In 18 19 
he bought a plot of ground from one John Ire- 
land, and erected a small frame house, where he 
lived and where he stored the tools of his rather 
grim trade. For three years he dwelt there, 
smoothing the resting places in the Field of 
Sleep; then, in 1823, a new Potter's Field was 
opened at the point now known as Bryant Park, 
and the bodies from the lower cemetery were 
carried there. Megie, apparently, lost his job, 
sold out to Joseph Dean and disappeared into 
obscurity. It is interesting to note that he bought 

■+- 18 -+■ 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

his plot in the first place for $500; now it is 
incorporated in the apartment house site which 
is estimated at about $250,000! 

There is a legend to the effect that Governor 
Lucius Robinson later occupied this same house, 
but the writer does not vouch for the fact. The 
Governor certainly lived somewhere in the 
vicinity, and his favourite walk was on Amity 
Street, — why can't we call it that now, instead 
of the cold and colourless Third Street? 

I find that I have said nothing of Monument 
Lane, — sometimes called Obelisk Lane, — yet it 
was quite a landmark in its day, as one may 
gather from the fact that Ratzer thought it im- 
portant enough to put in his official map. It 
ran, I think, almost directly along North Wash- 
ington Square, and, at one point, formed part 
of the " Inland Road to Greenwich " which was 
the scene of Revolutionary manoeuvres. Monu- 
ment Lane was so called because at the end of it 
(about Fifteenth Street and Eighth Avenue) stood 
a statue of the much-adored English general, James 
Wolfe, whose storming of the Heights of Abra- 
ham in the Battle of Quebec, and attendant defeat 
of the Marquis de Montcalm, have made him 
illustrious in history. After the Revolution, the 
statue disappeared, and there is no record of its 
fate. 

-a— 19 — e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

With the passing of the old Potter's Field, came 
many changes. Mayor Stephen Allen (later lost 
on the Henry Clay), made signal civic improve- 
ments; he levelled, drained and added three and 
a half acres to the field. In short, it became a 
valuable tract of ground. Society, driven steadily 
upward from Bowling Green, Bond Street, 
Bleecker and the rest, had commenced to settle 
down in the country. What had yesterday been 
rural districts were suburbs today. 

In 1806 there were as many as fifteen families 
in this neighbourhood rich and great enough to 
have carriages. Colonel Turnbull had an " out 
of town " house at, approximately, Eighth and 
Macdougal streets, — a charming cottage, with 
twenty acres of garden land which today are 
worth millions. Growing tired of living in the 
country, he offered to sell his place to his friend, 
Nehemiah Rogers; but the latter decided against 
it. 

" It is too far out of town! " he declared. 

"But you have a carriage!" exclaimed the 
Colonel. " You can drive in to the city when- 
ever you want to! " 

The distance was too great, however, and Mr. 
Rogers did not buy. 

By 1826, however, the tide had carried many 
persons of wealth out to this neighbourhood, and 

■+- 20 -+ 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

there were more and more carriages to be seen 
with each succeeding month. All at once, high 
iron railings were built about the deserted Potter's 
Field, — a Potter's Field no longer, — and on June 
27th of that year a proclamation was issued: 

" The corporation of the city of New York 
have been pleased to set apart a piece of ground 
for a military parade on Fourth Street near Mac- 
dougal Street, and have directed it to be called 
' Washington Military Parade Ground.' For the 
purpose of honouring its first occupation as a 
military parade, Colonel Arcularis will order a 
detachment from his regiment with field pieces 
to parade on the ground on the morning of the 
Fourth of July next. He shall fire a national 
salute and proclaim the name of the parade 
ground, with such ceremonies as he shall see fit." 

This occasion, an anniversary of American in- 
dependence, seems to have been a most gorgeous 
affair, with the Governor, Mayor and other offi- 
cials present, and a monumental feast to wind up 
with. The menu included, among other dainties, 
two oxen roasted whole, two hundred hams 
("with a carver at each"), and so many barrels 
of beer that the chronicler seems not to have had 
the courage to record the precise number! 

-h- 21 -+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

1827 seems to have seen a real growth of so- 
cial life around the Washington Parade Ground. 
The New York Gazette of June 7th advertised 
" three-story dwellings in Fourth Street, between 
Thompson and Macdougal streets, for sale. The 
front and rear of the whole range is to be 
finished in the same style as the front of the 
Bowery Theatre, and each to have a grass plot 
in front with iron railings." 

This promise of theatrical architecture seems 
a curious inducement, but it must have been 
effective, for many exclusive families came — no, 
flocked, — to live in the houses! 

In 1830 there was a grand celebration there in 
joint honour of the anniversary of the British 
evacuation and the crowning of Louis Philippe 
in France. Everybody sang patriotic French and 
American airs, sent off fireworks, fired salutes 
and had a wildly enthusiastic time. Incidentally, 
there were speeches by ex-President Monroe and 
the Hon. Samuel Gouveneur. Enoch Crosby, 
who was the original of Fenimore Cooper's fa- 
mous Harvey Birch in " The Spy," was present, 
and so was David Williams, one of the captors 
of Major Andre, — not to mention about thirty 
thousand others! 

This year saw, too, the founding of the Uni- 
versity of the City of New York, on the east side 

-J- 22 -8- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

of the Square, — or rather, the Parade Ground, 
as it was then. That fine old educational insti- 
tution came close to having its cornerstones chris- 
tened with blood, for it was the occasion of the 
well-known, — shall we say the notorious? — 
" Stonecutters' Riots." The builders contracted 
for work to be done by the convicts of Sing 
Sing Prison, and the city workmen, or Stone- 
cutters' Guild, — already strong for unions, — ob- 
jected. In fact, they objected so strenuously that 
the Twenty-seventh Regiment (now our popular 
Seventh) was called out, and stayed under arms 
in the Square for four days and nights; after 
which the disturbance died down. 

The next important labour demonstration in 
the Square was in 1855, when, during a period of 
" hard times," eight thousand workmen assembled 
there with drums and trumpets, and made 
speeches in the most approved and up-to-date 
agitator style, collecting a sum of money which 
went well up into four figures! 

In 1833 society folded its wings and settled 
down with something resembling permanence 
upon the corner of the " Snug Harbour " lands, 
which formed the famous North Side of Wash- 
ington Square. Of all social and architectural 
centres of New York, Washington Square North 
has changed least. Progress may come or go, 

-■-23^- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

social streams may flow upward with as much 
speed, energy and ambition as they will; the 
eddies leave one quiet and lovely pool unstirred. 
That fine row of stately houses remains the 
symbol of dignified beauty and distinction and 
an aristocracy that is not old-fashioned but 
perennial. 

Such names as we read associated with the 
story of Washington Square and its environs! 
Names great in politics and patriotism, in art and 
literature, in learning and distinction, in fash- 
ion and fame and architecture. Hardly one of 
them but is connected with great position or great 
achievement or both. Rhinelander, Roosevelt, 
Hamilton, Chauncey, Wetmore, Howland, Suf- 
fern, Vanderbilt, Phelps, Winthrop, — the list is 
too long to permit citing in full. Three mayors 
have lived there, and in the immediate vicinity 
dwelt such distinguished literary persons as Bay- 
ard Taylor, Henry James, George William Cur- 
tis, N. P. Willis (Nym Crynkle), our immortal 
Poe himself, Anne Lynch, — poetess and hostess 
of one of the first and most distinguished salons 
of America— Charles Hoffman, editor of the 
Knickerbocker, and so on. Another centre of 
wit and wisdom was the house of Dr. Orville 
Dewey, — whose Unitarian Church, at Broadway 
and Waverly Place, was the subject of the first 

•+- 24 -f- 




OLDEST BUILDING ON THE SQUARE 

On this moment of writing it is still standing on 
the south of Washington Square 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

successful photograph in this country by the 
secret process confided to Morse by Daguerre. 

Edgar Allan Poe lived with his sick young 
wife, Virginia, on Carmine Street, and lived very 
uncomfortably, too. The name of his boarding- 
house keeper is lost to posterity, but the poet 
wrote of her food: "I wish Kate our cat could 
see it. She would faint." 

Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the 
Square. Once in a while he moved away for a 
time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and 
to his old friends there. It was in Carmine Street 
that he wrote his " Arthur Gordon Pym," with 
Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it was 
on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he 
created " Ligeia " and " The Fall of the House 
of Usher." After Virginia's death, he took a 
room just off the Square, and wrote the " Imp of 
the Perverse," with her picture (it is said) above 
his desk. It was at these quarters that Lowell 
called on him, and found him, alas! "not him- 
self that day." The old Square has no stranger 
nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of the 
brilliant and melancholy genius who in life loved 
it so well. 

Poe's friend Willis published many of his 
stories and articles in the Sun, still a newcomer in 
the old field of journalism. Willis has his own 

+-25-+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

connection with the tale of the Square, though 
not a very glorious one. The town buzzed for 
days with talk of the sensational interview be- 
tween Nym Crinkle and Edwin Forrest, the actor. 
Mr. Willis made some comments on Forrest's 
divorce, in an editorial, and that player, so well 
adored by the American public, took him by the 
coat collar in Washington Square and exercised 
his stage-trained muscles by giving him a thor- 
ough and spectacular thrashing. 

Somewhere in that neighbourhood, much ear- 
lier, another editor, William Coleman, founder 
of the Evening Post, and Jeremiah Thompson, 
Collector of the Port, fought a duel to the death. 
It was indeed to the death, for Thompson was 
wounded fatally. But duels were common enough 
in those days; we feel still the thrill of indigna- 
tion roused by the shooting of Alexander Hamil- 
ton by Burr. 

The old University of New York — where Pro- 
fessor Morse conducted his great experiments in 
telegraphy, where Samuel Colt in his tower work- 
room perfected his revolver, where the Historical 
Society of New York was first established and 
where many of our most distinguished citizens 
received their education — was never a financial 
success. For a time they tried to make it pay by 
taking tenants — young students, and bachelors who 

-*- 26 -*- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

wished seclusion for writing or research. Then, 
in the course of time, it was moved away to the 
banks of the Hudson. On the site now stands a 
modern structure, where, to be sure, a few of the 
old University departments are still conducted, 
but which is chiefly celebrated as being the first 
all-bachelor apartment house erected in town. It 
is appropriately called the " Benedick," after a 
certain young man who scoffed at matrimony, — 
and incidentally got married! 

And a few of the families stay beneath the 
roofs their forefathers built, watching, as they 
watched, the same quiet trees and lawns and paths 
of the most charming square in all New York: 
De Forest, Rhinelander, Delano, Stewart, De 
Rham, Gould, Wynkoop, Tailer, Guinness, Claf- 
lin, Booth, Darlington, Gregory, Hoyt, Schell, 
Shattuck, Weekes— these, and others are still the 
names of the residents of Washington Square 
North. Father Knickerbocker, coming to smoke 
his pipe here, will be in good company, you 
perceive! 

The recollections of many living persons who 
recall the old Square and other parts of early 
New York, bring forcibly to us the realisation of 
the speed with which this country of ours has 
evolved itself. In one man's lifetime, New York 
has grown from a small town just out of its 

■4- 27 -*■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Colonial swaddling clothes to the greatest city in 
the world. These reminiscences, then, are but 
memories of yesterday or the day before. We 
do not have to take them from history books but 
from the diaries of men and women who are 
still wide-eyed with wonder at the changes which 
have come to their city! 

" The town was filled with beautiful trees," 
says one man (who remembers Commodore Van- 
derbilt, with the splendid horses, the fine manner 
and the unexampled profane eloquence), "but 
the pavements were very dirty. Places like St. 
John's Park and Abingdon Square were quiet 
and sweet and secluded. Where West Fourth 
Street and West Eleventh Street met it was so 
still you could almost hear the grass grow be- 
tween the cobblestones! Everything near the 
Square was extremely exclusive and fashionable. 
Washington and Waverly places were very aristo- 
cratic indeed." 

Waverly Place, by the bye, got its name 
through a petition of select booklovers who lived 
thereabouts and adored Sir Walter Scott. It speaks 
well for the good taste of the aristocratic quarter, 
even though the tribute came a bit late, — about 
twenty years after " Waverley " was published! 

The celebrated north side of the Square was 
called, by the society people, " The Row," and 

-j- 28 -J- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

was, of course, the last word in social prestige. 
But, for all its lofty place in the veneration of 
the world and his wife, its ways were enchant- 
ingly simple, if we may trust the tales we hear, 
In the Square stood the " Pump With The Long 
Handle," and thence was every bucketful of 
washing water drawn by the gilt-edged servants 
of the gilt-edged " Row"! The water was, it is 
said, particularly soft, — rain, doubtless, — and 
day by day the pails were carried to the main 
pump to be filled! 

When next you look at the motor stages gliding 
past the Arch, try, just for a moment, to visualise 
the old stages which ran on Fifth Avenue from 
Fulton Ferry uptown. They were very elaborate, 
we are told, and an immense improvement on the 
old Greenwich stagecoaches, and the great lum- 
bering vehicles that conveyed travellers along the 
Post Road. These new Fifth Avenue stages were 
brightly painted : the body of the coach was navy 
blue, the running gear white, striped with red, 
and the lettering and decorations of gold. A 
strap which enabled the driver to open and close 
the door without descending from his seat was 
looked upon as an impressive innovation! Inside, 
there were oil paintings on panels, small candles 
in glass boxes for illumination, and straw on the 
floor to keep your feet warm. These luxuries 

-*- 29 -+- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

justified the high rate which was charged. The 
fare was ten cents! 

In very heavy snowstorms the stages were apt 
to get stalled, so that a few stage sleighs were 
run in midwinter, but only in the city proper. 
Their farthest uptown terminal was at Four- 
teenth Street, so they were not much help to 
suburbanites! 

No single article, or chapter, can even attempt 
to encompass the complete story of Washington 
Square. Covering the entire period of the city's 
history, passing through startling changes and 
transformations, the scene of great happenings, 
the background of illustrious or curious lives, — 
it is probably more typical of the vertiginous de- 
velopment of New York than any single section. 
The Indians, the Dutch, the English, the Colo- 
nials, the Revolutionists, the New Americans, the 
shining lights of art, science, fashion and the state, 
have all passed through it, confidently and at 
home. The dead have slept there; wicked men 
have died there and great ones been honoured. 
Belles and beaux have minced on their way be- 
neath the thick green branches, — branches that 
have also quivered to the sound of artillery fire 
saluting a mighty nation newborn. Nothing that 
a city can feel or suffer or delight in has escaped 
Washington Square. Everything of valour and 

-t- 30 -*- 



CHEQUERED HISTORY OF A CITY SQUARE 

tragedy and gallantry and high hope — that go 
to making a great town as much and more than 
its bricks and mortar — are in that nine and three- 
quarters acres that make up the very heart and 
soul of New York. 

The lovely Arch first designed by Stanford 
White and erected by William Rhinelander Stew- 
art's public-spirited efforts, on April 30, 1889, 
was in honour of the centennial anniversary of 
Washington's inauguration; it was so beautiful 
that, happily, it was later made permanent in 
marble, and in all the town there could have been 
found no more fitting place for it. 

In every really great city there is one place 
which is, in a sense, sacred from the profanation 
of too utilitarian progress. However commer- 
cialised Paris might become, you could not 
cheapen the environs of Notre Dame! Whatever 
happens to us, let us hope that we will always 
keep Washington Square as it is today, — our 
little and dear bit of fine, concrete history, the 
one perfect page of our old, immortal New York! 

Father Knickerbocker, may you dream well! 



31 



The Green Village 




CHAPTER II 

The Green Village 

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb down Greenwich 
way! — Thomas Janvier. 

ID you know that " Greenwich Village " 
is tautology? That region known affec- 
tionately as " Our Village " is Green- 
wich, pure and simple, and here is the 
" why " of that statement. 

The word wich is derived from the Saxon 
wick, and originally had birth in the Latin 
vicus, which means village. Hence, Greenwich 
means sinply the Green Village, and was evi- 
dently a term describing one of the first small 
country hamlets on Manhattan. Captain Sir 
Peter Warren, on whom be peace and benedic- 
tions, is usually given the credit of having given 
Greenwich its name, the historians insisting that 
it was the name of his own estate, and simply 
got stretched to take in the surrounding country- 
side. This seems rather a stupid theory. The 
Warrens were undoubtedly among the earliest 
representative residents in the little country resort, 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

but by no stretch of imagination could any private 
estate, however ample or important, be called a 
village. But Greenwich was the third name to 
be applied to this particular locality. 

Once upon a time there was a little settlement 
of Indians — the tribe was called the Sappocanicon 
or Sappokanikee. Like other redmen they had 
a gift for picking out good locations for their 
huts or wigwams — whatever they were in those 
days. On this island of Manhattan they had 
appropriated the finest, richest, yet driest piece 
of ground to be had. There were woods and 
fields; there was a marvellous trout stream 
(Minetta Water) ; there was a game preserve, 
second to none, presented to them by the Great 
Spirit (in the vicinity of Washington Square). 
There was pure air from the river, and a fine 
loamy soil for their humble crops. It was good 
medicine. 

They adopted it far back in those beginnings 
of American history of which we know nothing. 
When you go down to the waterfront to see the 
ships steam away, you are probably standing 
where the braves and squaws had their forest 
home overlooking the river. 

But their day passed. Peter Minuit — who 
really was a worth-while man and deserved to 
be remembered for something besides his thrifty 

-4-36-+ 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

deal in buying Manhattan for twenty-four dollars 
— cast an eye over the new territory with a view 
to developing certain spots for the Dutch West 
India Company. He staked out the Sappokani- 
can village tentatively, but it was not really appro- 
priated until Wouter Van Twiller succeeded 
Minuit as director general and Governor of the 
island. 

Van Twiller was not one of the Hollanders' 
successes. R. R. Wilson says of him, " Bibulous, 
slow-witted and loose of life and morals, Van 
Twiller proved wholly unequal to the task in 
hand." Representing the West India Company, 
he nevertheless held nefarious commerce with 
the Indians — it is even reported that he sold 
them guns and powder in violation of express 
regulations — and certainly he was first and for- 
ever on the make. But before he was removed 
from office (because of these and other indis- 
cretions) he had founded Our Village, — so may 
his soul rest in peace! 

Not that he intended to do posterity a favour. 
He never wanted to help anyone but himself. 
But, in the first year of his disastrous governor- 
ship, he got the itch of tobacco speculation. He 
knew there was money in it. 

He, too, looked over the Indian village above 
the river, and he, too, found it good. He made 

-*-37-»- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

it the Company's Farm Number 3, but he did 
not work it for the company. Not he! He 
worked it for Wouter Van Twiller, as he worked 
everything else. He eliminated the Indians by 
degrees, whether by strategy or force history does 
not say. R. R. Wilson says it was " rum and war- 
fare." Anyway, they departed to parts unknown 
and Van Twiller built a farm and started an 
immense tobacco plantation. As the tobacco 
grew and flourished the place became known by 
the Dutch as the Bossen Bouwerie — the farm in 
the woods. It was one of the very earliest white 
settlements on the whole island. R. R. Wilson 
says, " Rum and warfare had before this made an 
end of the Indian village of the first days. Its 
Dutch successor, however, grew from year to 
year." 

The names of these first Dutch residents of the 
Bossen Bouwerie — or Sappocanican as it was still 
occasionally called — are not known, but it is cer- 
tain that there were a number of them. In the 
epoch of Peter Stuyvesant someone mentioned 
the houses at " Sappokanigan," and in 1679, after 
the British had arrived, a descriptive little entry 
was made in one of those delightfully detailed 
journals of an older and more precise generation 
than ours. The diary was the one kept by the 
Labadist missionaries — Dankers and Sluyter — 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

and was only recently unearthed by Henry Mur- 
phy at The Hague. It runs as follows: 

" We crossed over the island, which takes 
about three-quarters of an hour to do, and came 
to the North River, which we followed a little 
within the woods to Sapokanikee. Gerrit having 
a sister and friends, we rested ourselves and 
drank some good beer, which refreshed us. We 
continued along the shore to the city, where we 
arrived at an early hour in the evening, very much 
fatigued, having walked this day about forty 
miles. I must add, in passing through this island 
we sometimes encountered such a sweet smell in 
the air that we stood still; because we did not 
know what it was we were meeting." 

It is odd that the Dutch names in Greenwich 
have died out as much as they have. There is 
something in Holland blood which has a way 
of persisting. They — the old Manhattan Dutch 
anyway — had a certain stubborn individuality of 
their own, which refused to give way or com- 
promise. I have always felt that the way the 
Dutch ladies used to drink their tea was a most 
illuminating sidelight upon their racial char- 
acteristics. They served the dish of tea and the 
sugar separately — the latter in a large and awk- 

-J-39-?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

ward hunk from which they crunched out bites 
as they needed them. Now I take it that there 
was no particular reason for this inconvenient and 
labourious method, except that it was their way. 
They were used to doing things in an original and 
an unyielding fashion. I believe a real old-world 
Mevrouw would have looked as coldly askance 
upon the innovation of putting the sugar in the 
tea, as she looked at the pernicious ingress of 
the devil-endowed Church of England. 

In 1664 came the English rule in what had 
been New Amsterdam and with it British set- 
tlers and a new language. So the Bossen Bouwerie 
became Green Wich (later clipped in pronuncia- 
tion to Grinnich), the Green Village, and a 
peaceful, remote little settlement it remained for 
many a long year. 

Now came the rich and great in search of 
country air, health, rest or change of scene. 
Colonial society was not so different from twen- 
tieth century society. They, too, demanded occa- 
sional doses of rustic scenery and rest cures; and 
they began to drift out to the green little hamlet 
on the Hudson where they could commune with 
nature and fortify themselves with that incom- 
parable air. Captain Warren, Oliver de Lancey, 
James Jauncey, William Bayard and Abraham 
Mortier all acquired estates there. The road to 

-j- 40 -+• 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

Greenwich was by far the most fashionable of 
all the Colonial drives. 

Greenwich Road ran along the line of our 
present Greenwich Street, and gave one a lovely 
view of the water. At Lispenard's Salt Meadows 
(Canal Street) it ran upon a causeway, but the 
marshes overflowed in the spring, and soon they 
opened another road known as the Inland Road 
to Greenwich. This second lane ran from the 
Post Road or Bowery, westward over the fields 
and passing close to the site of the Potter's Field. 
This, I understand, was the favourite drive of the 
fashionable world a century and a half ago. 

If anyone wants to really taste the savour of old 
New York, let him read the journals of those by- 
gone days. Better than any history books will 
they make the past live again, make it real to 
you with its odd perfumes, and its stilted manner- 
isms, and its high-hearted courage and gallantry. 

I know of no quainter literature than is to be 
found in these very old New York papers. The 
advertisements alone are pregnant with sugges- 
tions of the past — colour, atmosphere, the subtle 
fragrance and flavour of other days. We read 
that James Anderson of Broadway has just arrived 
from London " in the brig Betsy " with a load of 
" the best finished boot legs." Another gentle- 
man urges people to inspect his " crooked tor- 

-2-41 -+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

toise-shell combs for ladies and gentlemen's hair, 
his vegetable face powder — his nervous essence 
for the toothache, his bergamot, lemon, lavendar 
and thyme " — and other commodities. 

Sales were advertised of such mixed assort- 
ments as the following: 

"For Sale: 

" A negro wench. 

" An elegant chariot. 

" Geneva in pipes, cloves, steel, heart and club, 
scale beams, cotton in bales, Tenerisse wines in 
pipes, and quarter casks." 

In several old papers you find that two camels 
were to be seen in a certain stable, at a shilling 
a head for adults and sixpence for children. 
The camels were a novelty and highly 
popular. 

Take this item, for instance, from the good old 
Daily Advertiser, chronicler of the big and little 
things of Manhattan's early days. It gives a fine 
example of old-style journalism. Observe the 
ingenuity with which a page of narrative is 
twisted into the first sentence. The last two are 
the more startling in their abrupt fashion of 
leaving the reader high and dry. The cow is 
starred; obviously the man appears a minor actor: 

-j- 42 ~h 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

" On Thursday afternoon, as a man of genteel 
appearance was passing along Beekman Street, 
he was attacked by a cow, and notwithstanding 
his efforts to avoid her, and the means he used 
to beat her off, we are sorry to say that he was 
so much injured as to be taken up dead. The 
cow was afterward killed in William Street. We 
have not been able to learn the name of the 
deceased "! ! 

Some of the items contain genuine if uncon- 
scious humour, — such as the record of the ques- 
tion brought up before the City Council: 
" Whether attorneys are thought useful to plead 
in courts or not? Answer: "It is thought 
not." 

Then there is the proclamation that if any In- 
dian was found drunk in any street, and it could 
not be ascertained where he got the liquor, the 
whole street was to be fined! 

Among the earlier laws duly published in the 
press was that hogs should not be " suffered to 
goe or range in any of the streets or lands." In 
1684 eight watchmen were appointed at twelve- 
pence a night. But read them for yourselves, — 
they are worth the trouble you will have to find 
them! 

There were many queer trades in New York, 
-J-43-J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

and all of them, or nearly all, advertised in the 
daily journals. In column on column of yellowed 
paper and quaint f-for-s printing, we read ex- 
hortations to employ this or that man, most of 
them included in the picturesque verse whose 
author I do not know: 

"Plumbers, founders, dyers, tanners, shavers, 
Sweepers, clerks and criers, jewelers, engravers, 
Clothiers, drapers, players, cartmen, hatters, 

nailers, 
Gangers, sealers, weighers, carpenters, and 
sailors! " 

And read the long-winded, yet really beautiful 
old obituary notices; the simple news of battles 
and high deeds; the fiery, yet pedantic, political 
editorials. Oh, no one knows anything about 
Father Knickerbocker until he has read the same 
newspapers that Father Knickerbocker himself 
read, — when he wasn't writing for them! 

The Revolution had passed and Greenwich was 
a real village, and growing with astonishing 
rapidity, even in that day of lightning develop- 
ment. 

In 1807 they started to do New York over, and 
they kept at it faithfully and successfully until 
181 1. Then began the laying out of streets ac- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

cording to numbers and fixed measurements, in- 
stead of by picturesque names and erratic cow- 
path meanderings. Gouverneur Morris, Simeon 
de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed 
by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one 
writer points out, they did not do it as badly as 
they might have done, nor as we are inclined to 
think they did when we try to find our way 
around lower New York today. The truth is that 
Greenwich had grown up, and always has grown 
up ever since, in an entirely independent and 
obstinate fashion all its own. There was not the 
slightest use in trying to make its twisty curli- 
cue streets conform to any engineering plan on 
earth; so those sensible old-time folk didn't try. 
William Bridges, architect and city surveyor, 
entrusted with the job, mentions " that part of 
the city which lies south of Greenwich Lane and 
North Street, and which was not included in 
the powers vested in the commissioners." And 
so Our Village remains itself, utterly and arro- 
gantly untouched by the confining orthodoxy of 
the rest of the town! 

The passing of the British rule was the signal 
for variously radical democratic changes, not only 
in customs and forms, but in nomenclature. After 
they had melted up a leaden statue of King 
George and made it into American bullets, they 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

went about abolishing every blessed thing in the 
city which could remind them of England and 
English ways. The names of the streets were, 
of course, nearly all intrinsically English. A 
few of the old Dutch names persisted — Bleecker, 
Vandam, and so on — but nearly every part of 
the town was named for the extolling of Britain 
and British royalty. Away then, said New 
York, with the sign manuals of crowns and 
autocracy! 

In 1783, when the English evacuated Manhat- 
tan, the Advertiser published: " May the remem- 
brance of this DAY be a lesson to princes! " and 
in this spirit was the last vestige of imperial rule 
systematically expunged from the city. Crown 
Street was a red rag to the bull of Young Amer- 
ica; it was called Liberty, and thus became 
innocuous! Queen Street doffed its ermine and 
became homely and humble, under the name of 
Cedar. King Street was now Pine. King George 
Street was abolished altogether, according to the 
chronicles. One is curious to know what they 
did with it; it must be difficult to lose a street 
entirely! A few streets and squares named for 
individual Englishmen who had been friendly 
to America were left unmolested — Abingdon 
Square, and also Chatham Street, which had been 
given its appellation in honour of the ever popu- 

-j- 46 -*- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

lar William Pitt, Earl of Chatham; Chatham 
Square, indeed, exists to this day- 
Greenwich was at all times a resort for those 
who could afford it, an exclusive and beautiful 
country region where anyone with a full purse 
could go to court health and rest among the trees 
and fields and river breezes. It was destined to 
become the most popular, flourishing and pros- 
perous little village that ever grew up over night. 
Those marvellously healthy qualities as to loca- 
tion and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a 
haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sick- 
ness. And in those days the island was contin- 
ually swept by epidemics — violent, far-reaching, 
and registering alarming mortality. Greenwich 
seemed to be the only place where one didn't get 
yellow fever or anything else, and terrorised citi- 
zens began to rush out there in droves, not only 
with their bags and their baggage, and their 
wives and children, but with their business 
too! 

John Lambert, an English visitor to America 
in 1807, writes: 

" As soon as yellow fever makes its appearance, 
the inhabitants shut up their shops and fly from 
their homes into the country. Those who cannot 
go far on account of business, remove to Green- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

wich, situate on the border of the Hudson about 
two or three miles from town. The banks and 
other public offices also remove their business to 
this place and markets are regularly established 
for the supply of the inhabitants." 

Things went so fast for Greenwich during the 
biggest of the yellow fever " booms " that one old 
chronicler (whose name I regret not being able 
to find) declares he " saw the corn growing on 
the corner of Hammond Street (West Eleventh) 
on a Saturday morning, and by the next Monday 
Niblo and Sykes had built a house there for three 
hundred boarders!" 

Devoe says that: 

"The visits of yellow fever in 1798, 1799, 
1803 and 1805 tended much to increase the for- 
mation of a village near the Spring Street Mar- 
ket and one also near the State Prison; but the 
fever of 1882 built up many streets with numerous 
wooden buildings for the uses of the merchants, 
banks (from which Bank Street took its name), 
offices, etc." 

" i The town fairly exploded,' " quotes Maca- 
tamney, — from what writer he does not state, — 

-*- 48 -+ 






THE GREEN VILLAGE 

" ' and went flying beyond its bonds as though 
the pestilence had been a burning mine.' " 

It was in 1822 that Hardie wrote: 

" Saturday, the 24th of August our city pre- 
sented the appearance of a town beseiged. From 
daybreak till night one line of carts, containing 
boxes, merchandise and effects, was seen moving 
towards Greenwich Village and the upper parts 
of the city. Carriages and hacks, wagons and 
horsemen, were scouring the streets and filling 
the roads; persons with anxiety strongly marked 
on their countenances, and with hurried gait, 
were hustling through the streets. Temporary 
stores and offices were erecting, and even on the 
ensuing day (Sunday) carts were in motion, and 
the saw and hammer busily at work. Within a 
few days thereafter the custom house, the post 
office, the banks, the insurance offices and the 
printers of newspapers located themselves in the 
village or in the upper part of Broadway, where 
they were free from the impending danger; and 
these places almost instantaneously became the 
seat of the immense business usually carried on 
in the great metropolis." 

Bank Street got its name in this way, the city 
banks transferring their business thither literally 
overnight, ready to do business in the morning. 

-a- 49 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Miss Euphemia M. Olcott in her delightful 
recollections of the past in New York, gives us 
some charming snapshots of a still later Green- 
wich as she got them from her mother who was 
born in 1819. 

" She often visited in Greenwich Village, both 
at her grandfather's and at the house of Mr. 
Abraham Van Nest, which had been built and 
originally occupied by Sir Peter Warren. But 
she never thought of going so far for less than a 
week! [She lived at Fulton and Nassau streets.] 
There was a city conveyance for part of the way, 
and then the old Greenwich stage enabled them 
to complete the long journey. This ran several 
times a day, and when my mother committed her 
hymn: 

" ( Hasten, sinner, to be wise, 

Ere this evening's stage be run ' 
she told us that for some years it never occurred 
to her that it could mean anything in the world 
but the Greenwich stage." 

In further quoting her mother, she tells of Sir 
Peter's house itself — then Mr. Van Nest's — as a 
square frame residence, with gardens both of 
flowers and vegetables, stables and numbers of 
cows, chickens, pigeons and peacocks. In the 

-*- 50 -h 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

huge hall that ran through the house were ma- 
hogany tables loaded with silver baskets of fresh- 
made cake, and attended by negroes. 

In our next chapter we are going back to meet 
this house a bit more intimately, and find out 
something of those who built it and lived in it, 
that fine gentleman, Sir Peter Warren and his 
beautiful lady, — Susannah. 

But let us not forget. 

Greenwich was not exclusively a settlement of 
the rich and great nor even solely a health re- 
sort and refuge. There were, besides the fine 
estates and the mushroom business sections, two 
humbler off-shoots: Upper and Lower Green- 
wich. The first was the Skinner Road — now 
Christopher Street; the second lay at the foot of 
Brannan Street — now Spring. To the Upper 
Greenwich in 1796 came a distinction which 
would seem to have been of doubtful advantage, — 
the erection of the New York State Prison. It 
stood on Amos Street, now our Tenth, close to 
the river and was an imposing structure for its 
time — two hundred feet in length with big wings, 
and a stone-wall enclosure twenty feet in height. 

Strange to say the Greenwichers did not object 
to the prison. They were quite proud of it, and 
seemed to consider it rather as an acquisition than 
a plague spot. No other village had a State 

■+- 51 -«- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Prison to show to visitors; Greenwich held its 
head haughtily in consequence. 

A hotel keeper in 1811 put this " ad." in the 
Columbia: 

" A few gentlemen may be accommodated with 
board and lodging at this pleasant and healthy 
situation, a few doors from the State Prison. The 
Greenwich stage passes from this to the Federal 
Hall and returns five times a day." 

Janvier says that the prison at Greenwich was 
a " highly volcanic institution." They certainly 
seemed never out of trouble there. Behind its 
walls battle, murder and sudden death seemed the 
milder diversions. Mutiny was a habit, and they 
had a way of burning up parts of the building 
when annoyed. On one occasion they shut up all 
their keepers in one of the wings before setting 
fire to it, but according to the Chronicle " one 
more humane than the rest released them before 
it was consumed." 

Hugh Macatamney declares that these mutinies 
were caused by terrible brutality toward the pris- 
oners. It is true that no one was hanged in the 
jail itself, the Potter's Field being more public and 
also more convenient, all things considered, but 
the punishments in this New York Bridewell were 

■+-52-*- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

severe in the extreme. Those were the days of 
whippings and the treadmill, — a viciously brutal 
invention, — of bread and water and dark cells 
and the rest of the barbarities which society hit 
upon with such singular perversity as a means 
of humanising its derelicts. The prison record of 
Smith, the " revengeful desperado " who spent 
half a year in solitary confinement, is probably 
of as mild a punishment as was ever inflicted 
there. 

In the grim history of the penitentiary there is 
one gleam of humour. Mr. Macatamney tells it 
so well that we quote his own words : 

" A story is told of an inmate of Greenwich 
Prison who had been sentenced to die on the 
gallows, but at the last moment, through the in- 
fluence of the Society of Friends, had his sen- 
tence commuted to life imprisonment, and was 
placed in charge of the shoe shop in the prison. 
The Quakers worked for his release, and, having 
secured it, placed him in a shoe shop of his own. 
His business flourished, and he was prominently 
identified with the progress of the times. He 
had an itching palm, however, and after a time 
he forged the names of all his business friends, 
eloped with the daughter of one of his bene- 
factors and disappeared from the earth, appar- 

+-53-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

ently. ' Murder will out.' A few years after the 
forger returned to the city, and established him- 
self under an assumed name in the making of 
shoes, forgetting, however, to maintain com- 
placency, and thinking that no one would recog- 
nise him. In a passion at what he considered the 
carelessness of one of his workmen regarding the 
time some work should have been delivered, he 
told the man he should not have promised it, as 
it caused disappointment. * Master,' said the 
workman, ' you have disappointed me worse than 
that' 'How, you rascal?' 'When I waited a 
whole hour in the rain to see you hanged.' " 

In 1828 and 1829 the prisoners were transferred 
to Sing Sing, and the site passed into private 
hands and the Greenwich State Prison was 
no more. I believe there's a brewery there 
now. 

It is an odd coincidence that the present Jeffer- 
son Market Police Court stands now at Tenth 
Street, — though a good bit further inland than 
the ancient State's Prison. The old Jefferson 
Market clock has looked down upon a deal of 
crime and trouble, but a fair share of goodness 
and comfort too. It is hopeful to think that the 
present regime of Justice is a kindlier and a 
cleaner one than that which prevailed when the 

-*-54-»- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

treadmill and the dark cell were Virtue's methods 
of persuading Vice. 

Someone, I know not who, wrote this apropos 
of prisons in Greenwich: 

u In these days fair Greenwich Village 
Slept by Hudson's rural shores, 
Then the stage from Greenwich Prison 
Drove to Wall Street thrice a day — 
Now the sombre ' Black Maria ' 
Oftener drives the other way." 

But I like to think that the old clock, if it 
could speak, would have some cheering tales to 
tell. I like to believe that ugly things are slip- 
ping farther and farther from Our Village, that 
honest romance and clean gaiety are rather the 
rule there than the exception, and that, perhaps, 
the day will sometime dawn when there will be 
no more need of the shame of prisons in Green- 
wich Village. 

The early social growth of the city naturally 
centred about its churches. Even in Colonial 
days conservative English society in New York 
assembled on Sunday with a devotion directed 
not less to fashion than to religion. We must 
not forget that America was really not America 
then, but Colonial England. A graceful mili- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

tarism was the order of the day, and in the fash- 
ionable congregations were redcoats in plenty. 
The Church of England, as represented and up- 
held by Trinity Parish, was the church where 
everyone went. If one were stubborn in dis- 
senting — which meant, briefly, if one were Dutch 
— one attended such of those sturdy outposts of 
Presbyterianism as one could find outside the 
social pale. But one was looked down upon 
accordingly. 

It is not hard to make for oneself a colourful 
picture of a typical Sunday congregation in these 
dead and gone days. Trinity was the Spiritual 
Headquarters, one understands; St. Paul's came 
later, and was immensely fashionable. Though 
it was rather far out from Greenwich the Green- 
wich denizens patronised it at the expense of 
time and trouble. A writer, whose name I 
cannot fix at the moment, has described the 
Sabbath attendance: — ladies in powder and 
patches alighting from their chaises; servants, 
black of skin and radiant of garment; officers in 
scarlet and white uniforms (Colonel " Ol " de 
Lancey lost his patrimony a bit later because he 
clung to his!) — a soft, fluttering, mincing crowd — 
most representative of the Colonies, and loathed 
by the stiff-necked Dutch. 

Trinity got its foothold in 1697, and the rest 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

of the English churches had holdings under the 
Trinity shadow. St. Paul's (where Sir Peter 
Warren paid handsomely for a pew, and which 
is today perhaps the oldest ecclesiastic edifice in 
the city, and certainly the oldest of the Trinity 
structures) was built in 1764, on the street called 
Vesey because of the Rev. Mr. Vesey, its spiritual 
director. The " God's Acre " around it held 
many a noted man and woman. Yet, as it is so 
far from the ground in which we are now con- 
cerning ourselves, it seems a bit out of place 
perhaps. But one must perforce show the English 
church's beginnings, soon to find a more solid 
basis in St. John's Chapel, dear to all New York- 
ers even nowadays when we behold it menaced 
by that unholy juggernaut, the subway. 

St. John's was begun in 1803 and completed 
in 1807. It was part of the old King's Farm, 
originally granted to Trinity by Queen Anne, 
who appears to have done quite a lot for New 
York, take it all in all. It was modelled after 
St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, in London, and always 
stood for English traditions and ideals. This did 
not prevent the British from capturing the organ 
designed for it and holding it up for ransom in 
the War of 1812. The organ was made in Phila- 
delphia, but was captured en route by the British 
ship Plantaganet, a cruiser with seventy-four 

-*-57-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

guns, which was in the habit of picking up little 
boats and holding them at $100 to $200 each. 
Luckily the church bell had been obtained be- 
fore the war! 

In regard to the organ, the Weekly Register 
of Baltimore has this to say: 

" A great business this for a ship of the line. 
. . . Now a gentleman might suppose that this 
article would have passed harmless." 

St. John's Park, now obliterated and given 
over to the modernism of the Hudson River Rail- 
road Company, used, in the early fifties, to be still 
fashionable. Old New Yorkers given to remem- 
brance speak regretfully of the quiet and peace 
and beauty of the Old Park — which is no more. 
But St. John's is still with us, " sombre and un- 
alterable," as one writer describes it, " a stately 
link between the present and the past." 

And doubtless nearly everyone who reads these 
pages knows of St. John's famous " Dole " — the 
Leake Dole, which has been such a fruitful topic 
for newspaper writers for decades back. 

John Leake and John Watts, in the year 1792, 
founded the Leake and Watts' Orphan House and 
John Leake, in so doing, added this curious 
bequest: 

-*- $8 -*- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

" I hereby give and bequeathe unto the rector 
and inhabitants of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church of the State of New York one thousand 
pounds, put out at interest, to be laid out in the 
annual income in sixpenny wheaten loaves of 
bread and distributed on every Sabbath morning 
after divine service, to such poor as shall appear 
most deserving." 

This charity has endured through the years 
and is now the trust of St. John's. I have been 
told — though I do not vouch for it — that the 
bread is given out not after divine service but 
very early in the morning, when the grey and 
silver light of the new day will not too merci- 
lessly oppress the needy and unfortunate, some 
of them once very rich, who come for the 
Dole. 

In 1822 St. Luke's was built — also a part of the 
elastic Trinity Parish, and probably the best- 
known church, next to old St. John's, that stands 
in Greenwich Village today. 

The prejudices of the English Church in early 
New York prevented the Catholics from gaining 
any sort of foothold until after the British evacua- 
tion. In 1783 St. Peter's, the first Roman Cath- 
olic Church, was erected at Barclay Street, and 
much trouble they had, if account may be relied 

-*-59-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

on. The reported tales of an escaped nun did 
much to inflame the bigoted populace, but this 
passed, and today St. Joseph's, which was built 
in 1829, stands on the corner of Washington Place 
and Sixth Avenue. 

It is not far away, by the bye, that the old 
Jewish cemetery is to be found. Alderman Cur- 
ran quaintly suggested that an unwarned stranger 
might easily stub his toe on the little graveyard 
on Eleventh Street. It is Beth Haim, the Hebrew 
Place of Rest, close to Milligan Lane. The same 
Eleventh Street, which (as we shall see later) 
was badly handicapped by " the stiff-necked Mr. 
Henry Brevoort" cut half of Beth Haim away. 
But a corner of it remains and tranquil enough 
it seems, not to say pleasant, though almost under 
the roar of the Elevated. 

The Presbyterian churches got a foothold 
fairly early; — probably the first very fashionable 
one was that on Mercer Street. Its pastor, the 
Reverend Thomas Skinner, is chiefly, but de- 
servedly, renowned for a memorable address he 
made to an assembly of children, some time in 
1834. Here is an extract which is particularly 
bright and lucid: 

" Catechism is a compendium of divine truth. 
Perhaps, children, you do not know the meaning 

•+- 60 -+• 




THE CRADLE OF BOHEMIA 

The first and most famous French restaurant in 
New York 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

of that word. Compendium is synonymous with 
synopsis " ! ! ! 

The old Methodist churches were models of 
Puritanism. In the beginning they met in car- 
penter shops, or wherever they could. When 
they had real churches, they, for a long time, had 
separate entrances for the sexes. 

It was after I had read of this queer little side 
shoot of asceticism that I began to fully appre- 
ciate what a friend of mine had said to me con- 
cerning the New Greenwich. 

" The Village," he said, " is a protest against 
Puritanism." And, he added: " It's just an 
island, a little island entirely surrounded by 
hostile seas! " 

The Village, old and new, is a protest. It is 
a voice in the wilderness. Some day perhaps it 
will conquer even the hostile seas. Anyway, 
most of the voyagers on the hostile seas will 
come to the Village eventually, so it should 
worry! 

The Green Village is green no longer, except 
in scattered spots where the foliage seems to bub- 
ble up from the stone and brick as irrepressibly 
as Minetta Water once bubbled up thereabouts. 
But it is still the Village, and utterly different 
from the rest of the city. Not all the commis- 

-e— 6 1 — e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

sioners in the world could change the charming, 
erratic plan of it; not the most powerful pres- 
sure of modern business could destroy its insistent, 
yet elusive personality. The Village has always 
persistently eluded incorporation in the rest of the 
city. Never forget this: Greenwich was de- 
veloped as independently as Boston or Chicago. 
It is not New York proper: it is an entirely 
separate place. At points, New York overflows 
into it, or it straggles out into New York, but it 
is first and foremost itself. It is not changeless 
at all, but its changes are eternal and superbly in- 
dependent of, and inconsistent with, metropolitan 
evolution. 

There was a formative period when, socially 
speaking, the growth of Greenwich was the 
growth of New York. But that was when Green- 
wich was almost the whole of fashionable 
New York. Later New York plunged onward 
and left the green cradle of its splendid begin- 
nings. But the cradle remained, still to cherish 
new lives and fresh ideals and a society pro- 
foundly different, yet scarcely less exclusive in 
its way, than that of the Colonies. It has been 
described by so many writers in so many ways 
that one is at a loss for a choice of quotations. 
Perhaps the most whimsically descriptive is in 
O. Henry's " Last Leaf." 

-*- 62 -+■ 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

" In a little district west of Washington Square 
the streets have run crazy and broken themselves 
into small strips called ' places.' These ' places ' 
make strange angles and curves. One street 
crosses itself a time or two. An artist once dis- 
covered a valuable possibility in this street. Sup- 
pose a collector with a bill for paint, paper and 
canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly 
meet himself coming back, without a cent having 
been paid on account! " 

And Kate Jordan offers this concerning Wav- 
erly Place: 

" Here Eleventh and Fourth streets, refusing 
to be separated by arithmetical arrangements, 
meet at an unexpected point as if to shake hands, 
and Waverly Place sticks its head in where some 
other street ought to be, for all the world like a 
village busybody who has to see what is happen- 
ing around the corner." 

But what of the spirit of Greenwich? The 
truth is that first and foremost Greenwich is the 
home of romance. It is a sort of Make Believe 
Land which has never grown up, and which will 
never learn to be modern and prosaic. 

It is full of romance. You cannot escape it, no 
-*-63 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

matter how hard you try to be practical. You 
start off on some commonplace stroll enough — or 
you tell yourself it will be so; you are in the 
middle of cable car lines and hustling people 
and shouting truck drivers, and street cleaners 
and motors and newsboys, and all the component 
parts of a modern and seemingly very sordid 
city — when, lo and behold, a step to the right 
or left has taken you into another country entirely 
— I had well-nigh said another world. Where 
did it come from — that quaint little house with 
the fanlight over the door and the flower-starred 
grassplot in front? Did it fall from the skies or 
was it built in a minute like the delectable little 
house in "Peter Pan"? Neither. It has stood 
there right along for half or three-quarters of a 
century, only you didn't happen to know it. You 
have stepped around the corner into Greenwich 
Village, that's all. 

" In spots there is an unwonted silence, as 
though one were in some country village," says 
Joseph Van Dyke. " . . . There are scraps of 
this silence to be found about old houses, old 
walls, old trees." 

Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become pos- 
sible. You know that a lady in a mob-cap and 
panniers is playing inside that shyly curtained 
window. Hark! You can hear the thin, deli- 

-*- 64 -t- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

cate notes quite plainly: this is such a quiet little 
street. A piano rather out of tune? Perish the 
thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet, — a harpsi- 
chord. Almost you can smell pot-pourri. 

Perhaps it was of such a house that H. C. 
Bunner wrote: 

" We lived in a cottage in old Greenwich Village, 
With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown 
and hard; 
But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage, 
And the roses sprang up in our little back- 
yard; " 

The garden hunger of the Village! It is some- 
thing pathetic and yet triumphant, pitiful and 
also splendid. It is joyous life and growth hop- 
ing in the most unpromising surroundings: it is 
eager and gallant hope exulting in the very teeth 
of defeat. Do you remember John Reed's — 

" Below's the barren, grassless, earthen ring 
Where Madame, with a faith unwavering 
Planted a wistful garden every spring, — 
Forever hoped-for, — never blossoming/' 

Yet they do blossom, those hidden and usually 
unfruitful garden-places. Sometimes they bloom 

-*-65-+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

in real flowers that anyone can see and touch and 
smell. Sometimes they come only as flowers of 
the heart — which, after all, will do as well as 
another sort, — in Greenwich Village, where they 
know how to make believe. 

Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes 
Greenwich: 

" A walk through the heart of this interesting 
locality — the American quarter, from Fourteenth 
Street down to Canal, west of Sixth Avenue — will 
reveal a moral and physical cleanliness not found 
in any other semi-congested part of New York; 
an individuality of the positive sort transmitted 
from generation to generation; a picturesqueness 
in its old houses, ' standing squarely on their right 
to be individual ' alongside those of modern times, 
and, above all else, a truly American atmosphere 
of the pure kind." 

He adds: 

"Please remember, too, that in 1816 Green- 
wich Village had individualism enough to be the 
terminus of a stage line from Pine Street and 
Broadway, the stages c running on the even hours 
from Greenwich and the uneven hours from Pine 
Street.' " 

-*- 66 -*- 



THE GREEN VILLAGE 

You walk on through Greenwich Village and 
you will expect romance to meet you. Even 
the distant clang of a cable car out in the city 
will not break the spell that is on you now. 
And if you have a spark of fancy, you will 
find your romance. You cannot walk a block 
in Greenwich without coming on some stony 
wall, suggestive alley, quaint house or vista or 
garden plot or tree. Everything sings to you 
there; even the poorest sections have a quaint 
glamour of their own. It gleams out at you from 
the most forbidding surroundings. Sometimes it 
is only a century-old door knocker or an ancient 
vine-covered wall — but it is a breath from the 
gracious past. 

And as you cannot go a step in the Village 
without seeing something picturesque so you can- 
not read a page of the history of Greenwich with- 
out stumbling upon the trail of romance or ad- 
venture. As, for example, the tale of that same 
Sir Peter Warren, whose name we have encoun- 
tered more than once before, as proper a man as 
ever stepped through the leaves of a Colonial 
history and the green purlieus of Old Greenwich! 



67 



The Gallant Career of 
Sir Peter Warren 



CHAPTER III 

The Gallant Career of Sir Peter Warren 

"... Affection with truth must say 
That, deservedly esteemed in private life, 
And universally renowned for his public conduct, 

The judicial and gallant Officer 
Possessed all the amiable qualities of the 

Friend, the Gentleman, and the Christian ..." 

— From the epitaph written for Sir 
Peter's tomb in Westminster Abbey 
by Dr. Samuel Johnson. 




HE sea has always made a splendid 
romantic setting for a gallant hero. 
Even one of moderate attainments and 
inconsiderable adventures may loom to 
proportions that are quite picturesque when given 
a background of tossing waves, " all sails set," 
and a few jolly tars to sing and fight and heave 
the rope. And when you have a hero who needs 
no augmenting of heroism, no spectacular em- 
bellishment as it were, — what a gorgeous figure 
he becomes, to be sure! 

Peter Warren, fighting Irish lad, venturesome 
sailor, sometime Admiral and Member of Par- 
liament, and at all times a merry and courageous 
soldier of the high seas, falls heir to as pretty 

-i— 71 -i- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

and stirring a reputation as ever set a gilded 
aureole about the head of a man. Though he 
was in the British navy and a staunch believer in 
" Imperial England," he was so closely associated 
with New York for so many years that no book 
about the city could be written without doing 
him some measure of honour. No figure is so 
fit as Sir Peter's to represent those picturesque 
Colonial days when the " Sons of Liberty " had 
not begun to assemble, and this New York of 
ours was well-nigh as English as London town 
itself. So, resplendent in his gold-laced uniform 
and the smartly imposing hat of his rank and 
office, let him enter and make his bow, — Admiral 
Sir Peter Warren, by your leave, Knight of the 
Bath, Member of Parliament, destined to lie at 
last in the stately gloom of the Abbey, with the 
rest of the illustrious English dead. 

He came of a long line of Irishmen, and cer- 
tainly did that fine fighting race the utmost credit. 
From his boyhood he was always hunting trouble; 
he dearly loved a fight, and gravitated into the 
British navy as inevitably as a duck to water. 
He was scarcely more than an urchin when he 
became a fighting sailor, and indeed one could 
expect no less, for both his father and grand- 
father had been officers in the service, and good- 
ness knows how many lusty Warrens before them! 

-*- 72 -*- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

For our friend Peter was a Warren of Warrens- 
town, of the County Meath just west of Dublin, 
and let me tell you that meant something! 

The Warrens got their estates in the days of 
" Strongbow," and held them through all the 
vicissitudes of olden Ireland. They were a house 
called " English-Irish," and " inside the pale," 
which means that they stood high in British 
favour, and contributed heroes to the army or 
navy from each of their hardy generations. They 
had no title, but to be The Warren of Warrens- 
town, Meath, was to be entitled to look down 
with disdain upon upstart baronets and newly 
created peers. Sir Christopher Aylmer's daugh- 
ter, Catherine, was honoured to marry Captain 
Michael Warren, and her brother, Admiral Lord 
Aylmer, only too glad to take charge of her boy 
Peter later on. 

Peter was the youngest of a family, composed 
with one exception of boys, and the most am- 
bitious of the lot. When he was nine years old 
(he was born in 1703, by the bye), his father, 
Captain Michael, died, and three years later 
the oldest son, Oliver, decided to send Peter 
to his uncle Lord Aylmer to be trained for the 
service. Is it far-fetched to assume that Oliver 
found his small brother something of a handful? 
If Peter was one-quarter as pugnacious and fool- 

- ? -73- i - 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

hardy at twelve as he was at forty, there is small 
wonder that a young man burdened with the cares 
of a large estate and an orphaned family would 
be not unwilling to get rid of him, — or at least 
of the responsibility of him. Their uncle, the 
Admiral, apparently liked his little Irish nephew, 
and proceeded to train him for a naval career, 
with such vigourous success that at fourteen our 
young hero volunteered for His Majesty's service, 
— a thing, we may take it, which had been the 
high dream of his boyish life. 

And it was real service too. Boys turned into 
men very quickly in those days. In Southern 
and African waters young Peter saw plenty of 
action. He had such adventures as our modern 
boys sit up at night to read of. For there were 
pirates to be encountered then, flesh-and-blood 
pirates with black flags and the rest of it. And 
deep-sea storms meant more in those days of 
sails and comparatively light vessels than we can 
even imagine today. So swiftly did Peter grow 
up under this stern yet thrilling education with 
the English colours, that after four short years 
he was a lieutenant. And in another six, at an 
age when most young men are barely standing on 
the threshold of their life-work, he was posted a 
full captain and given his first command! 

His ship was H. M. S. Grafton, of seventy 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

guns, — no small honour for a boy of hardly 
twenty-four, — and it proved to be no empty 
honour either. No sooner had he been posted 
captain than he was ordered into action. At that 
time there were signal and violent differences of 
opinion between England and other countries, — 
notably Spain and France. Gibraltar was the 
subject of one of them, it may be recalled. It 
was to Gibraltar that Captain Warren and his 
good ship Grafton were ordered. And when Sir 
Charles Wager seized that historic bone of conten- 
tion, Peter was with the fleet that did the seizing. 

From that moment he was in the thick of 
trouble wherever it was to be found, like the 
dear, daredevil young Irishman that he was! 
Just a moment let us pause to try to visualise this 
youthful adventurer of ours, with the courtly 
manners, the irrepressible boyish recklessness and 
the big heart. Our only authentic descriptions 
of him are of a Peter Warren many years older; 
our only even probable likenesses are the same. 
But let us take these, and reckoning backward 
see what a man of such characteristics must have 
been like in his early twenties. 

A delightful old print ostensibly representing 
him at forty, shows him to have been a round- 
faced, more or less portly gentleman, with a full, 
pleasant mouth and very big and bright eyes. 

-*- 75 -e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

His wig is meticulously curled and powdered, 
and he is, plainly, a very fine figure of a man 
indeed. Roubilliac's bust of him in Westminster 
makes him much better looking and not nearly 
so stout. Thomas Janvier, who has written de- 
lightfully about our captain, disturbs me by in- 
sisting that he was a little man, — nay, his insult 
goes deeper: he says a little, fat man! I simply 
will not accept such a distressing theory! 

Edward de Lancey, descended from the family 
of the girl Peter married, describes him as being 
". . .Of attractive manners, quick in perception 
and action, but clear-headed and calm in judg- 
ment." And the historian Parkman declares that 
at forty-two he had " the ardour of youth still 
burning within him." Reverse the figures. What 
do you suppose that ardour was like when he was 
not forty-two but twenty-four? 

At the time of our hero's first command and 
first naval engagement on his own ship, things 
were quite exciting for his King and country, 
though we have most of us forgotten that such 
excitements ever existed. England had a host of 
enemies, some of them of her own household. 
It was even whispered that the American pos- 
sessions were not entirely and whole-heartedly 
loyal! This seemed incredible, to be sure, but 
the men in high places kept an eye on them just 

-*- 76 -+■ 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

the same. Captain Warren's first official post 
was the station of New York, and in 1728 he 
made his first appearance in this harbour. 

He was then just twenty-five, and gloriously- 
adventurous. One can imagine with what a 
thrill he set sail for a new country, new friends, 
new excitements! I wonder if he guessed that 
the lady of his heart awaited him in that un- 
known land, as well as the dear home where, for 
all his sea-roving taste, he was to return again 
and again through twenty rich years? He was 
in command of the frigate Solebay then, and in 
the old papers we read many mentions of both 
ship and officer. From almost the first Peter 
loved the Colonies and the Colonies loved him. 
In between his cruises and battles he kept coming 
back like a homing bird, and every time he came 
he seemed to have won a little more glory with 
his various ships, — the sloop Squirrel, the frigate 
Launceston, and the big ship Superbe with sixty 
guns. It is said that no man save only the Gov- 
ernor himself made so fine an appearance as 
young Captain Warren, and fair ladies vied with 
each other for his attentions! Nevertheless, his 
social successes at this time were nothing to what 
was to come, when he had more money to spend! 

Two years after his first introduction to New 
York, the Common Council of the city voted to 

-j- 77 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

him " the freedom of the city," from which one 
gathers some idea of his standing in public 
favour! And in another year, — of course, — he 
got married, and to one of the prettiest girls in 
the town, Susanna de Lancey! 

Janvier says that the marriage did not take 
place until 1744, but other authorities place it at 
thirteen years earlier. It is much more probable 
that Peter got married at twenty-eight than at 
forty-one; I scarcely think that he could have 
escaped so long! 

Susanna's father was Monsieur Etienne de 
Lancey, a Huguenot refugee, who had fled from 
Catholic France to the more liberal Colonies, and 
settled here. He soon changed the Etienne to 
Stephen, married the daughter of one of the old 
Dutch houses (Van Cortlandt) and went into 
business. Just what his occupation was is not 
clear, but later he acted as agent for Captain 
Warren in the disposal of his war prizes. His 
sons, James and Oliver, were intimate friends of 
Peter's through life, and, as will be seen, they 
worked together most zestfully when in later 
years the captain's boundless energies took a turn 
at politics. 

So gallant Irish-English Peter and lovely 
French-Dutch Susanna were married and, we be- 
lieve, lived happily ever after. They lived in 

-*- 78 -+ 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

New York town proper, but I conceive that, like 
other young lovers, they made many a trip out 
into the country, and that it was their dream to 
live there one day when they should be rich. Cer- 
tain it is that as soon as our hero did get a little 
money at last he could hardly wait to buy the 
farm land far out of town on the river. But that 
time was not yet. 

Needless to say, Peter's married life, happy as 
it was, could not keep him long on shore. We 
keep finding his name and the names of his ships 
in the delicious old newspapers of his day: Cap- 
tain Warren has just arrived; Captain Warren's 
ship has "gone upon the careen" (i.e., is being 
repaired) ; Captain Warren is sailing next week, 
and so on, and so on. The New York Gazette 
for May 31, 1736, states that: " On Saturday last, 
Captain Warren in His Majesty's ship the Squir- 
rel arrived here in eight weeks from England." 
One perceives that this was record time, and 
worth a journalistic paragraph! 

Troubles becoming more rife with Spain in 
1739, Peter begged for active service and got it. 
This probably was the beginning of his great 
prosperity, though his wealth did not become 
sensational until nearly five years later. For- 
tunes were constantly being made in prize ships 
in those days, and you may be sure that our enter- 

-*-79-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

prising sea-fighter was not behind other men in 
this or in anything else calling for initiative and 
daring! At all events the records seem to show 
that he bought his lands in the Green Village, — 
Greenwich, — about 1740, when he was thirty- 
seven. Whether he built his house at that early 
date is not clear, but he probably didn't have 
money enough yet, for when he did build, it was 
on a magnificent scale. In 1744, however, came 
his golden harvest time! 

It was a little after midwinter of that year 
that Sir Chaloner Ogle made him commodore of 
a sixteen-ship squadron in the waters of the Lee- 
ward Islands where there was decidedly good 
hunting in the way of prize ships. Off Mar- 
tinique were many French and Spanish boats 
simply waiting, it would almost seem, to be eaten 
alive by the enemy's cruisers; and Captain Peter 
who had the sound treasure-hunting instinct of 
your born adventurer, proceeded to gobble them 
up! In the four months that rolled jovially by 
between the middle of February and the middle 
of June, the Captain captured twenty-four of 
these prizes, one alone with a plate cargo valued 
at two hundred and fifty thousand pounds! Ah, 
but those were the rare days for a stout-hearted 
seafaring man, with a fleet of strong boats and 
an expensive taste! 

-*- 80 -j- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

Captain Warren brought his prizes to New 
York and handed them over to his father-in-law's 
firm, — advertised in the old papers as " Messieurs 
Stephen de Lancey and Company," — who acted 
as his agents in practically all of what Janvier 
disrespectfully styles " his French and Spanish 
swag"! Governor Clinton had exempted prizes 
from duty, so it was all clear profit. With the 
proceeds of the excellent deals which De Lancey 
made for him, he then proceeded to cut the 
swathe for which he was by temperament and 
attributes so well fitted. 

There never was an Irishman yet, nor a sailor 
either, who could not spend money in the grand 
manner. Our Captain was no exception, be cer- 
tain! He figures superbly in the social accounts 
of the day; it is safe to assert that he set the pace 
after a fashion, and fair Mistress Susanna was a 
real leader of real Colonial dames! He appears 
to have been a genuinely and deservedly popular 
fellow, our Peter Warren, throwing his prize 
money about with a handsome lavishness, and 
upholding the honour of the British navy as gal- 
lantly in American society as ever he had in hos- 
tile waters abroad. 

And now for that dream of a country home! 
Warren had lands on the Mohawk River and else- 
where, but his heart had always yearned for the 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

tract of land in sylvan Greenwich. In that quiet 
little hamlet on the green banks of the Hudson the 
birds sang and the leaves rustled, and the blue 
water rested tired eyes. Peter at this time owned 
nearly three hundred acres of ground there and 
now that he had money in plenty, he lost no time 
in building a glorious dovecote for himself and 
Mistress Susanna — a splendid house in full keep- 
ing with his usual large way of doing things. 

Stroll around the block that is squared by the 
present Charles, Perry, Bleecker and Tenth streets 
some day, look at the brick and stone, the shops 
and boarding-houses, — and try to dream yourself 
back into the eighteenth century, when, in that 
very square of land, stood the Captain's lovely 
country seat. In those days it was something 
enormous, palatial, and indeed was always known 
as the Mansion or Manse. This is, of course, 
the basis for the silly theory that Greenwich got 
its name from the estate. Undoubtedly the War- 
ren place was the largest and most important one 
out there, and for a time to " go out to visit at 
Greenwich," meant to go out to visit the Manse. 
For years the Captain and the Captain's lady lived 
in this beautiful and restful place with three 
little daughters to share their money, their affec- 
tions and their amiable lives. Thomas Janvier's 
description of the house as he visualises it with 

•*- 82 -*- 



'*£ 







OLD ST. JOHN S 

<l Still faces on Varick Street, sombre and unaltered, 
a stately link between the present and the past" 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

his rich imagination is too charming not to 
quote in part: 

" The house stood about three hundred yards 
back from the river, on ground which fell away 
in a gentle slope towards the waterside. The 
main entrance was from the east; and at the rear 
— on the level of the drawing-room and a dozen 
feet or so above the sloping hillside — was a 
broad veranda commanding the view westward 
to the Jersey Highlands and southward down the 
bay to the Staten Island Hills." The fanciful 
description goes on to picture Captain Warren 
sitting on this veranda, " smoking a comforting 
pipe after his mid-day dinner; and taking with 
it, perhaps, as seafaring gentlemen very often did 
in those days, a glass or two of substantial rum- 
and-water to keep everything below hatches well 
stowed. With what approving eye must he have 
regarded the trimly kept lawns and gardens below 
him; and with what eyes of affection the Launces- 
ton, all a-taunto, lying out in the stream!" 

I have called the description of the house 
" fanciful," but it is really not that, since the 
old house fell into Abraham Van Nest's hands 
at a later date, and stood there for over a century, 
with the poplars, for which it was famous, and 
the box hedges, in which Susanna had taken 
such pride, growing more beautiful through the 

-*- 83 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

years. Not until 1865 was the lovely place de- 
stroyed by the tidal wave of modern building. 
The Captain kept his town house as well,— the 
old Jay place, on the lower end of Broadway, 
but it was at the Manse that he loved best to 
stay, and the Manse which was and always re- 
mained his real and beloved home. In 1744 his 
seaman's restlessness again won over his domestic 
tranquillity and he was off once more in search 
of fresh adventures and dangers. Says the 
Weekly Post Boy, of August 27th, in that year: 

" His Majesty's ship Launceston, commanded 
by the brave Commodore Warren (whose absence 
old Oceanus seems to lament), being now suffi- 
ciently repaired, will sail in a few days in order 
once more to pay some of His Majesty's enemies 
a visit." 

And it winds up with this burst: 

" The sails are spread; see the bold warrior comes 
To chase the French and interloping Dons!" 

It was in the following year that he signally 
distinguished himself in the historic Siege of 
Louisbourg, winning himself a promotion to the 
rank of Rear Admiral of the Blue, and a knight- 

+-84--H- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

hood as well! It may seem a far cry from Green- 
wich, New York, to Louisbourg, but we cannot 
pass over the incident without sparing it a little 
space. Let me beg your patience, — quoting, in 
my own justification, no less a historian than 
James Grant Wilson: 

" This Commodore Warren was one of those in- 
defatigable and nervous spirits who did such 
wonders at Louisbourg, and it is with particular 
pride that his achievement should be remembered 
in a history of New- York, as he was the only 
prominent New-Yorker that contributed to Mas- 
sachusetts' greatest Colonial achievement." 

The capture of Louisbourg may be remembered 
by some history readers as a part of that English- 
French quarrel of 1745, commonly known as 
" King George's War," and also as the under- 
taking described by so many contemporaries as 
" Shirley's Mad Scheme." The scheme was 
rather mad; hence its appeal to Peter Warren, 
who was exceedingly keen about it from the 
beginning. 

Louisbourg was a strong French fortress on 
Cape Breton Island, commanding the gulf of the 
St. Lawrence. Its value as a military strong- 
hold was great, and besides it had long been a 

-*- 85 -*■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

fine base for privateers, and was a very present 
source of peril to the New England fishermen 
off the Banks. As far back as 1741 Governor 
Clarke of New York had urged the taking of 
this redoubtable French station, but it fell to the 
masterful Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, 
finally to organise the expedition. He had Colo- 
nial militia to the tune of four thousand men, and 
he had Colonial boats, — nearly a hundred of 
them, — and he had the approval of the Crown 
(conveyed through the Duke of Newcastle) ; 
but he wanted leaders. For his land force he chose 
General Pepperrill, an eminently safe and sane 
type of soldier; for the sea he, with a real brain 
throb, thought of Captain Peter Warren. Francis 
Parkman says: "Warren, who had married an 
American woman and who owned large tracts of 
land on the Mohawk, was known to be a warm 
friend to the provinces." He was at Antigua 
when he received the Governor's request that he 
take command of the " Mad Scheme." Needless 
to say, the Captain was charmed with the idea, 
but he had no orders from the King! He refused 
almost weeping, and for two days was plunged in 
gloom. Imagine such a glorious chance for a 
fight going begging! 

Then arrived a belated letter from Newcastle 
in England, telling him to " concert measures 

-*-86-*- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

with Shirley for the annoyance of the enemy." 
Warren was so afraid that some future orders 
would be less vague, and give him less freedom, 
that he set sail for Boston with a haste that was 
feverish. He had with him three ships, — the 
Mermaid and Launceston of forty guns each, and 
the Superbe of sixty. But those two wretched 
days of delay! He fell in with a schooner from 
which he learned that Shirley's expedition had 
started without him! 

I daresay, being a sailor and Irish, our Cap- 
tain expressed himself exhaustively just then; 
but he recovered speedily and told the schooner 
to send him every British ship she met in her 
voyage; then he changed his course and beat 
straight for Canseau, determined to be in that 
expedition after all. He certainly was in it, and 
a brisk time he had of it, too. 

At Canseau they were all tied up three weeks, 
drilling and waiting for the ice to break, but 
they were thankful to get there at all. The 
storms were severe, as may be gathered by this 
account of their efforts to get into Canseau, writ- 
ten by one of the men: " A very Fierse Storm of 
Snow, som Rain and very Dangerous weather to 
be so nigh ye Shore as we was; but we escaped 
the Rocks and that was all." 

Pepperrill was thankful enough to see the Cap- 
-«- 87 — e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

tain and his squadron, — it was four ships now, as 
the schooner had picked up another frigate for 
him, — but the two commanders were destined to 
rub each other very much the wrong way be- 
fore they were through. Pepperrill was a man 
who took risks only very solemnly and with de- 
liberation, and who was blessed with endless 
patience. Warren took risks with as much zest 
as he took rare food and rich wine, and in his 
swift, full and exciting life there had never been 
place or time for patience! When the siege ac- 
tually commenced, the poor Captain nearly went 
wild with the inaction. He wanted to attack, to 
move, to do something. Pepperrill's calm judg- 
ment and slow tactics drove him distracted, and 
they were forever at odds in spite of a secret 
respect for each other. In speaking of the con- 
trast between them, Parkman, after describing 
Pepperrill's careful management of the military 
end, says: "Warren was no less earnest than he 
for the success of the enterprise. . . . But in 
habits and character the two men differed widely. 
Warren was in the prime of life, and the ardour 
of youth still burned within him. He was im- 
patient at the slow movement of the siege." 

The Siege of Louisbourg started by Warren's 
and Pepperrill's demand that the fortress sur- 
render, and the historic answer of Duchambon, 

-e— 88 — e- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

the French commander, that they should have 
their answer from the cannon's mouth. It is not 
my purpose to tell of it in detail, for it lasted 
forty-seven days and strained the nerves of every- 
one to the breaking point. But one or two things 
happened in the time which, to my mind, make 
our Captain seem a very human person. There 
was, for instance, his amazing kindness, as un- 
failing to his captives as to his own men. When 
the great French man-of-war Vigilant came to 
the aid of the beleaguered fortress, Warren joy- 
ously captured the monster, in full sight of 
Louisbourg and under the big guns there. It 
was this incident, by the bye, for which he was 
knighted afterwards. The French captain, 
Marquis de la Maisonfort, who was Warren's 
prisoner, wrote in a letter to Duchambon: " The 
Captain and officers of this squadron treat us, not 
as their prisoners, but as their good friends." 

Warren went wild with rage when he heard of 
the horrors that had befallen an English scouting 
party which had fallen into the hands of a band 
of Indians and Frenchmen, and hideously tor- 
tured. He wrote stern protests to Duchambon, 
and it was at this time that he urged Pepperrill 
most earnestly to attack. But the more phleg- 
matic officer could not see it in that way. War- 
ren then argued with increasing heat that by this 

-2— 89 — e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

time the French reinforcements must be near, 
and could easily steal up under cover of the fog 
which was thick there every night. When Pep- 
perrill still objected he lost his temper entirely, 
and said and wrote a number of peppery things. 
" I am sorry," he said, " that no one plan, though 
approved by all my captains, has been so fortunate 
as to meet your approbation or have any weight 
with you! " 

Pepperrill explained imperturbably that War- 
ren was trying to take too much authority upon 
himself. Captain Peter sent him a furious note: 
" I am sorry to find a kind of jealousy which I 
thought you would never conceive of me. And 
give me leave to tell you I don't want at this time 
to acquire reputation, as I flatter myself mine 
has been pretty well established long before!" 

And then, as full of temper as a hot-headed 
schoolboy, he brought out a letter from Governor 
Shirley expressing regret that Captain Warren 
could not take command of the whole affair, — 
" which I doubt not would be a most happy event 
for His Majesty's service." 

Even this could not shake the General's super- 
human calm. He was indeed so quiet about it, 
and so uniformly polite, that his fiery associate 
was simply obliged to cool off. He was of too 
genuinely fine fibre to bear a grudge or to make 

-j- 90-+ 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

a hard situation harder, and he consented to 
compromise, saying truly that at such times it was 
" necessary not to Stickle at Trifles! " 

At last the time came for action, and on the 
seventeenth of June they took Louisbourg, in a 
most brilliant and stirring manner, and Warren 
was so wild with delight that he could not con- 
tain himself. He scribbled a note to Pepperrill 
which sounds like the note of a rattle-pated col- 
lege lad instead of a distinguished naval com- 
mander: "We will soon keep a good house to- 
gether, and give the Ladys of Louisbourg a gal- 
lant Ball." 

He probably gave that ball, too, though there 
doesn't seem to be any record of it. He cer- 
tainly had a beautiful time going about making 
speeches to the troops, amid much cheering; and 
dispensing casks of rum in which to drink his 
health and King George's! He was made the 
English Governor of the fortress temporarily, and 
when the news of their capture reached England 
both commanders were knighted and Peter War- 
ren was made Rear Admiral of the Blue. 

And in the height of the excitement a ship 
arrived at Louisbourg one fine day bearing 
Susanna herself, who had come in person to see 
that the hero of the day was really safe and sound! 

A letter written from Louisbourg on Septem- 
-*- 91 -*• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

ber 25th, and published in the Weekly Post Boy, 
gives this account: 

"... The King has made the General a 
baronet of Great Britain; and 'tis said Mr. War- 
ren will be one also, who is recommended by the 
Lords Justices to the King of Governor of this 
Place, and is made Rear Admiral of the Blue: 
He hoisted his Flag yesterday Afternoon on the 
Superbe, when he was saluted by the Ships in 
the Harbour, and the Grand Battery." 

Soon after, — if we may trust James Grant Wil- 
son's history, — he did indeed receive the Order of 
the Bath, and so henceforward we must give him 
his title, — Admiral Sir Peter Warren, no less! 
After he came home from Louisbourg, the city 
of New York was so well pleased with him that 
the council voted him some extra land, — which 
he really did not need in the least, having plenty 
already. 

At least one more exploit was to be added to 
the wreath of Peter Warren's brave enterprises 
in behalf of his King and country. In 1747 the 
French again became troublesome. A fleet of 
French men-of-war under one La Jonquiere, an 
able commander, was ordered to go and retake 
Louisbourg, — that, at least, among other things. 

■+- 92 -+■ 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

Sir Peter went to join the English commander, 
Anson, off Cape Finisterre, — (the " End of the 
Earth ") and acquitted himself there so gallantly 
and effectively that again his country rang with 
praise of him, — his country which then lay on two 
sides of the sea. America's pride in him is shown 
by some of the comments in the New York 
press, after he had so brilliantly helped in the 
capture of La Jonquiere's ships. Here is, for in- 
stance, one letter from an eyewitness which was 
printed in the New York Gazette, August 31, 
1747: 

" I have the Honour to send you some Particu- 
lars concerning the late Engagement on 3rd In- 
stant off Cape Finisterre; which, tho' in the 
greatest degree conducive to the Success of that 
glorious Day, yet have not been once mentioned 
in the publick Papers. . . . You may be sur- 
priz'd, Sir, when I assert, that out of the formi- 
dable English Squadron, but seven Ships were 
engag'd properly speaking. Concerning the Gal- 
lantry of three of them, which were the Head- 
most Ships, you have already had publick ac- 
counts; and my intention by this, is to warm your 
hearts with an Account of the Behaviour of two 
others, the Devonshire, Admiral Warren's Ship, 
and the Bristol, commanded by Capt. Montague." 

-i-93-j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

The letter goes on to describe the battle 
minutely, telling how Warren came boldly up to 
the French Commodore's ship, and attacked her, 
" — And, having receiv'd her fire, as terrible a 
one as ever I saw, ran up within Pistol-shot and 
then returned it, and continued a brisk fire till 
the enemy struck." Then, he continues, Warren 
" made up to the Invincible " and attacked her, 
later seconded by Montague. Anson, the com- 
manding Admiral, he adds rather drily, was at 
least a mile astern. 

In the same edition of the paper which prints 
this letter, we find a little side light on the way 
in which Lady Warren spent her days when her 
magnificent husband was away at the wars. Be- 
tween an advertisement of " Window Crown- 
Glass just over from England," and "A Likely 
Strong Negro Wench, fit for either Town or 
Country Business, to be sold," we find a crisp lit- 
tle paragraph: 

" All Persons that have any Demands on the 
Honourable Sir Peter Warren, are desired to 
carry their accounts to his Lady, to be adjusted, 
and receive Payment." 

Sir Peter was, as we have seen, not a person 
who could sit still and peacefully do nothing. 

-e— 94 —?- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

Inactivity was always a horror to him; even his 
domestic happiness and his wholesome joy in his 
wife and daughters could not entirely fill his life 
when he was not at sea. His first naive and 
childish pleasure in his immense fortune was an 
old story, and the King couldn't provide a battle 
for him every moment. The real events of his 
life were war cruises, but in between he began 
to take a hand in the politics of New York. He 
was high in favour with the English Throne — 
with some reason, we must admit — and he didn't 
mind stating the fact with the candour and doubt- 
less the pride of a child of nature, as well as — 
who knows? — a touch of arrogance, as became 
a man of the world, and an English one to 
boot! 

His brother-in-law, James de Lancey, was 
Chief Justice, and at sword's point with Clinton, 
the Governor of New York. De Lancey boasted 
politely but openly that he and Sir Peter had 
twice as much influence in England as had Clin- 
ton, which was probably quite true. Clinton was 
desperately afraid of them both. Just when Clin- 
ton felt he was making a little headway Warren 
was called to London to enter Parliament as the 
member for Westminster. This gave him more 
prestige than ever, and the Governor moved 
heaven and earth to discredit him in the eyes 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

of the Lords of Trade in London. But just then 
heaven and earth were personified by the British 
Crown and Court, and they turned deaf ears to 
Clinton and listened kindly to the naval hero 
who had made himself so prime a favourite. 
Clinton firmly expected and fervently feared that 
Warren's influence would mean his eventful over- 
throw and not until our hero's death did he ever 
draw a breath that was free from dread. 

After the Revolution some of the De Lanceys 
lost their lands because of their loyalty to the 
Crown, but in Sir Peter's time the sun shone for 
those who stood by the King. 

But the day came speedily when Sir Peter 
sailed away to return no more, and I am sure 
every tree in Greenwich and every cobblestone 
in New York mourned him! 

It was in 1747 that our hero was summoned 
to London, to enter Parliament and from that 
time on was a bright particular star in English 
society. Known as " the richest man in Eng- 
land," he was a truly magnificent figure in a 
magnificent day. Lady Warren, who was still a 
beauty and a wit, was a great favourite at Court, 
and writers of the day declared her to be the 
cleverest woman in all England. Think of what 
golden fortunes fell to the three Warren girls, 
who were now of marriageable age! 

-«— 96 — e- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

They made our old friend Peter Admiral of 
the Red Squadron as well as an M. P., and Lady- 
Warren so splendidly brought out her daughters 
that Charlotte married Willoughby, Earl of 
Abingdon, and Ann wed Charles Fitzroy, Baron 
Southampton. The youngest girl, Susanna, chose 
a colonel named Skinner, — and New York, still 
affectionately inclined toward the Admiral's 
daughters, named streets after the husbands of 
all three! Our present Christopher Street used 
to be Skinner Road; Fitzroy Road ran northward, 
near our Eighth Avenue from Fourteenth Street 
far uptown; Abingdon Road, which was known 
colloquially and prettily as " Love Lane," was 
far, far out in the country until much later, some- 
where near Twenty-first Street. Abingdon Square 
alone preserves one of the old family names, and 
in Abingdon Square I am certain some of those 
dear ghosts come to walk. 

And still I find that I have not told the half of 
Sir Peter's story! I have not told of his adven- 
tures in the Mohawk country, where he travelled 
from sheer love of adventure and danger in the 
first place, and afterward established a fine set- 
tlement and plantation; of his placing there his 
sister's young son, William Johnson, later to be a 
great authority on matters pertaining to the In- 
dians, and how he sent him out vast consignments 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

of " rum and axes," to open negotiations with the 
Mohawks; how in his letter to his nephew he 
sounded a note of true Irish blarney, in caution- 
ing him not to find fault with the horses supplied 
by a certain man, " since he is a relation of my 
wife's!" I have not told of his narrow escape 
from the Indians on one dramatic occasion; nor 
of his trip to the West Indies as an envoy of 
peace; nor of his services in Barbadoes which 
caused the people thereof to present him with a 
gorgeous silver monteith, or punch-bowl; nor of 
the mighty dinner party he gave at which the 
Rev. Mr. Moody said the historic grace: " Good 
Lord, we have so much to be thankful for that 
time would be infinitely too short to do it in. We 
must, therefore, leave it for eternity. Amen." 
I have said nothing of Sir Peter's attack of small- 
pox, which left his good-looking face badly 
marked, if we can believe the likeness modelled 
by Roubilliac; nor — but it would take volumes to 
tell the full and eventful story of this brave and 
gallant-hearted man, who died when he was only 
forty-eight, in the year 1752. It seems incredible 
that so much could have been crowded into so 
short a life. In death he was honoured quite as 
he deserved, for his tomb in the Abbey is a gor- 
geous and impressive one, and such men as the 
great French sculptor, and Dr. Johnson himself, 

~i- 98 -*- 



GALLANT CAREER OF SIR PETER WARREN 

had a hand in making it memorable in proportion 
to his greatness. 

In looking over our hero's career we are struck 
by the absence of shadows. One would say 
that so unrelieved a record of success, of honour, 
glory, love and wealth, so much pure sunshine, 
so complete a lack of all trouble or defeat, must 
make a picture flat and characterless, insipid in 
its light, bright colours, insignificant in its deeper 
values. But it is not so. Peter Warren, the 
spoiled child of fortune, was something more 
than a child of fortune, since he won his good 
things of life always at the risk of that life which 
he enriched; and surely, no obstinately fortuitous 
twist of circumstances could ever really spoil 
him. 

His honestly heroic qualities are his passport. 
He cannot seem smug, nor colourless, nor over- 
prosperous: he is too vivid and too vigorous. 
His childish vanity is nobly discounted by his 
childlike simplicity in facing big issues. The 
blue and gold which he wore so magnificently 
can never to us be the mere trappings of rank: 
they carry on them the shadows of battle smoke, 
and the rust of enviable wounds. Let us take 
his memory then gladly, and with true homage, 
rejoicing that its record of happiness appears as 
stainless as its history of honour, and well satisfied 

•+-99-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

to find one picture in which something of the 
sunshine of high gallantry seems caught, and for 
all time. 

Dr. Johnson wrote thirty lines of eulogy of 
him, with the nicety and distinction of phrase 
which one would expect. Perhaps the simple 
ending of it is most impressive of all; so let us 
make it our own for the occasion: 

"... But the ALMIGHTY, 
Whom alone he feared, and whose gracious pro- 
tection 

He had often experienced, 
Was pleased to remove him from a place of 
Honour, 

To an eternity of happiness, 
On the 2Qth day of July, I J 52, 
In the 4Qth year of his age." 



ioo 



The Story of Richmond Hill 



CHAPTER IV 

The Story of Richmond Hill 

If my days of fancy and romance were not past, I could find 
here an ample field for indulgence! — Abigail Adams, writing 
from Richmond Hill House, in 1783. 




HAD left dear St. John's,— for this 
time my pilgrim feet were turned a 
bit northward to a shrine of romance 
rather than religion. I meandered 
along Canal, and traversed Congress Street. Con- 
gress, by the bye, is about two yards long; do 
you happen to know it? 

In a few moments, I was standing in a sort of 
trance at that particular point of Manhattan 
marked by the junction of Charlton and Varick 
streets and the end of Macdougal, about two hun- 
dred feet north of Spring. And there was noth- 
ing at all about the scenic setting, you would 
surely have said, to send anyone into any kind 
of a trance. 

On one side of me was an open fruit stall; on 
another, a butcher's shop; the Cafe Gorizia 
(with windows flagrant with pink confectionery), 
-*- 103 -»- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

and the two regulation and indispensable saloons 
to make up the four corners. 

In a sentimentally reminiscent mood, I took 
out a notebook, to write down something of my 
impressions and fancies. But there was a general 
murmur of war-inflamed suspicion, and I de- 
sisted and fled. How was I to tell them that 
there, where I stood, in that very citified and 
very nearly squalid environment (it was raining 
that day too), I could yet see, quite distinctly, 
the shadowy outlines of the one-time glorious 
House of Richmond Hill? 

They were high gates and ornate, one under- 
stands. I visualised them over and against the 
dull and dingy modern buildings. Somewhere 
near here where I was standing, the great drive- 
way had curved in between the tall, fretted iron 
posts, to that lovely wooded mound which was 
the last and most southern of the big Zantberg 
Range, and seemingly of a rare and rich soil. 
The Zantberg, you remember, started rather far 
out in the country, — somewhere about Clinton 
Place and Broadway, — and ran south and west 
as far as Varick and Van Dam streets. 

I had passed on Downing Street one house 
at least which looked as though it had been there 
forever and ever, but just here it was most com- 
monplace and present-century in setting, and the 
-*- 104-*- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

roar of traffic was in my ears. But I am sure 
that I saw Richmond Hill House plainly, — that 
distinguished structure which was described by 
an eyewitness as " a wooden building of massive 
architecture, with a lofty portico supported by 
Ionic columns, the front walls decorated with 
pilasters of the same order and its whole appear- 
ance distinguished by a Palladian character of 
rich though sober ornament." We learn further 
that its entrance was broad and imposing, that 
there were balconies fronting the rooms on the 
second story. The inside of the house was spa- 
ciously partitioned, with large, high rooms, mas- 
sive stairways with fine mahogany woodwork, and 
a certain restful amplitude in everything which 
was a feature of most of the true Colonial houses. 

Thomas Janvier quotes from some anonymous 
writer of an earlier day: " From the crest of this 
small eminence was an enticing prospect; on the 
south, the woods and dells and winding road 
from the lands of Lispenard, through the valley 
where was Borrowson's tavern; and on the north 
and west the plains of Greenwich Village made 
up a rich prospect to gaze on." 

Lispenard's Salt Meadows lie still, I suppose, 

under Canal Street North. I have not been able 

to place exactly Borrowson's tavern. Our old 

friend, Minetta Water, which flowed through the 

-j- 105 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

site of Washington Square, made a large pond 
at the foot of Richmond Hill, — somewhere about 
the present junction of Bedford and Downing 
streets. In winter it offered wonderful skating; 
in summer it was a dream of sylvan loveliness, 
and came to be called Burr's Pond, after that 
enigmatic genius who later lived in the house. 

One more description — and the best — of Rich- 
mond Hill as it was the century before last; 
this one written by good Mistress Abigail, wife 
of John Adams, one-time vice-president of the 
United States, during their occupancy of the 
place. Said she, openly adoring the Hill at all 
times: 

" In natural beauty it might vie with the most 
delicious spot I ever saw. It is a mile and a half 
from the city of New York. The house stands 
upon an eminence; at an agreeable distance flows 
the noble Hudson, bearing upon its bosom in- 
numerable small vessels laden with the fruitful 
productions of the adjacent country. Upon my 
right hand are fields beautifully variegated with 
grass and grain, to a great extent, like the valley 
of Honiton in Devonshire. Upon my left the 
city opens to view, intercepted here and there by 
a rising ground and an ancient oak. In front 
beyond the Hudson, the Jersey shores present 
-e- 106 -*- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

the exuberance of a rich, well-cultivated soil. In 
the background is a large flower-garden, enclosed 
with a hedge and some every handsome trees. 
Venerable oaks and broken ground covered with 
wild shrubs surround me, giving a natural beauty 
to the spot which is truly enchanting. A lovely 
variety of birds serenade me morning and eve- 
ning, rejoicing in their liberty and security." 

The historian, Mary L. Booth, commenting on 
the above, says: 

" This rural picture of a point near where 
Charlton now crosses Varick Street naturally 
strikes the prosaic mind familiar with the locality 
at the present day as a trick of the imagination. 
But truth is stranger, and not infrequently more 
interesting, than fiction." 

And now go back to the beginning. 

A very large section of this part of the island 
was held under the grant of the Colonial Gov- 
ernment, by the Episcopal Church of the city 
of New York — later to be known more succinctly 
as Trinity Church Parish. St. John's, — not built 
at that time, of course — is part of the same 
property. This particular portion (Richmond 
Hill), as we may gather from the enthusiastic 
-e- 107 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

accounts of those who had seen it, must have been 
peculiarly desirable. At any rate, it appealed 
most strongly to one Major Abraham Mortier, 
at one time commissary of the English army, 
and a man of a good deal of personal wealth and 
position. 

In 1760, Major Mortier acquired from the 
Church Corporation a big tract including the 
especial hill of his desires and, upon it, high 
above the green valleys and the silver pond, he 
proceeded to put a good part of his considerable 
fortune into building a house and laying out 
grounds which should be a triumph among coun- 
try estates. 

That he was a personage of importance goes 
without saying, for His Majesty's forces had right 
of way in those days, in all things social as well 
as governmental. He proceeded to entertain 
largely, as soon as he had his home ready for it, 
and so it was that at that time Richmond Hill 
established its deathless reputation for hospitality. 

Mortier did not buy the property outright but 
got it on a very long lease. Though his first name 
sounds Hebraic and his last Gallic, he was, we 
may take it, a thoroughly British soul, for he 
called it Richmond Hill to remind him of Eng- 
land. The people of New York used to gossip 
excitedly over the small fortune he spent on those 
.-*- 108 -2- 




2a ■"•'■ 



WASHINGTON ARCH 

"... Let us hope that we will always keep 
Washington Square as it is to-day — our little and 
dear bit of fine, concrete history, the one perfect 
page of our old, immortal New York" 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

grounds, the house was the most pretentious that 
the neighbourhood had boasted up to that time. 
Of course the Warren place was much farther 
north, and this particular locality was only just 
beginning to be fashionable. 

A friend of the Commissary's, and a truly illus- 
trious visitor at the Hill, was Sir Jeffrey Amherst, 
later Lord Amherst. He made Mortier's house 
his headquarters at the close of his campaigns 
waged against French power in America. He is 
really not so well known as he should be, for in 
those tangled beginnings of our country we can 
hardly overestimate the importance of any one 
determined or strategic move, and it is due to 
Amherst, very largely, that half of the State of 
New York was not made a part of Canada. In- 
cidentally, Amherst College is named for him. 

The worthy Commissary died, it is believed, 
at about the time that trouble started. On April 
13th, in the memorable year 1776, General Wash- 
ington made " the Hill " his headquarters, and 
the house built by the British army official was 
the scene of some of the most stirring conferences 
that marked the beginning of the Revolution. 

At the vitally important officers' councils held 

behind those tall, white columns, there was one 

man so unusual, so brilliant, so incomprehensible, 

that a certain baffling interest if not actual ro- 

•+- 109 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

mance attaches itself automatically to the bare 
utterance or inscription of his name, — Aaron 
Burr. He was aide-de-camp to General Putnam, 
and already had a vivid record behind him. It 
was during Washington's occupancy of Richmond 
Hill that Burr grew to love the place which was 
later to be his own home. 

I confess to a very definite weakness for Aaron 
Burr. Few hopeless romanticists escape it. Dra- 
matically speaking, he is one of the most striking 
figures in American history, and I imagine that I 
have not been the first dreamer of dreams and 
writer of books who has haunted the scenes of 
his flesh-and-blood activity in the secret, half- 
shamefaced hope of one day happening upon his 
ghost! 

From the day of his graduation from college 
at sixteen, he somehow contrived to win the at- 
tention of everyone whom he came near. He 
still wins it. We love to read of his frantic 
rush to the colours, guardian or no guardian; of 
the steel in him which lifted him from a bed of 
fever to join the Canadian expedition; of his 
daring exploits of espionage disguised as a French 
Catholic priest; of a hundred and one similar 
incidents in a life history which, as we read it, 
is far too strange not to be true. 

Spectacular he was from his birth, and even 
-t- no -+ 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

today his name upon a page is enough to set up 
a whole theatre in our imaginations. Just one 
incident comes to me at this moment. It is so 
closely associated with the region with which 
this book is concerned, that I cannot but set it 
down in passing. 

The story runs that it was a mistake in an order 
which sent General Knox of Silliman's Brigade 
to a small fort one mile from town (that is, about 
Grand Street) , known as " Bunker's Hill " — not 
to be confounded with the other and more famous 
"Bunker"! It happened to be a singularly un- 
fortunate position. There was neither food nor 
water in proper quantities, and the munitions 
were almost non-existent. The enemy was on the 
island. 

Whether Major Burr, of Putnam's division, 
was sent under some regular authority, or whether 
he characteristically had taken the matter into 
his own hands, the histories I have read do not 
tell. But they do tell of his galloping up, breath- 
less on a lathered horse, making the little force 
understand the danger of their position, pleading 
with his inimitable eloquence and advancing the 
reasons for their retreat at once. The men were 
stubborn; they did not want to retreat. But he 
talked. He proved that the English could take 
the scrap of a fort in four hours; he exhorted and 
■+- in -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

urged, and at last he won. They said they would 
follow him. From that moment he took charge, 
and led them along the Greenwich Road through 
the woods, skirting the swamps, fording the 
rivers, to Harlem, to safety and to eventual 
victory. 

This was only one of many instances in which 
his wit, his eloquence, his good sense, his leader- 
ship and his unquestioned personal daring served 
his country and served her well. 

When Washington moved his headquarters to 
the Roger Morris house near the Point of Rocks, 
a period of comparative mystery descended for 
a time upon Richmond Hill. During the ensuing 
struggle, and before the formal evacuation of 
New York, the house is supposed to have been 
occupied off and on by British officers. But in 
1783 they departed for good! and in 1789, Vice- 
president John Adams and Mistress Abigail came 
to live there. 

We have already read two examples of Mrs. 
Adams' enthusiastic outpourings in regard to 
Richmond Hill. She was, in fact, never tired 
of writing of it. A favourite quotation of hers 
she always applied to the place: 

" In this path, 
How long soe'er the wanderer roves, each step 
■+- 112 -*- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

Shall wake fresh beauties; each last point present 
A different picture, new, and each the same." 

That entire neighbourhood was rich in game, — 
we have already seen that the Dutch farmers 
thought highly of the duck shooting near the 
Sand Hill Road, and that Minetta Brook was a 
first-class fishing stream. Birds of all sorts were 
plentiful, and the Adamses did their best to pre- 
serve them on their own place. But too keen 
sportsmen were always stealing into the Rich- 
mond Hill grounds for a shot or two. " Oh, for 
game laws!" was her constant wail. In one 
letter she declares: "The partridge, the wood- 
cock and the pigeon are too great temptations for 
the sportsman to withstand!" 

And please don't forget for one moment that 
this was at Charlton and Varick streets! 

The House on the Hill was the home of quite 
ceremonious entertaining in those days. John 
Adams, in another land, would surely have been 
a courtier — a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead. 
John T. Morse, Jr., says that the Vice-president 
liked " the trappings of authority." The same 
historian declares that in his advice to 
President Washington, ". . .he talked of 
dress and undress, of attendants, gentlemen- 
in-waiting, chamberlains, etc., as if he were 
"*~ IX 3 -*■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

arranging the household of a European 
monarch." 

Gulian C. Verplanck (sometimes known by the 
nom de plume of "Francis Herbert"), wrote in 
1829, quite an interesting account of Richmond 
Hill as he personally recalled it. He draws for 
us a graphic picture of a dinner party given by 
the Vice-president and Mrs. Adams for various 
illustrious guests. 

After entering the house by a side door on the 
right, they mounted a broad staircase with a 
heavy mahogany railing. Dinner was served in 
a large room on the second floor with Venetian 
windows and a door opening out onto the balcony 
under the portico. And then he gives us these 
vivid little vignettes of those who sat at the great 
table: 

In the centre sat " Vice-president Adams in full 
dress, with his bag and solitaire, his hair frizzed 
out each side of his face as you see it in Stuart's 
older pictures of him. On his right sat Baron 
Steuben, our royalist republican disciplinarian 
general. On his left was Mr. Jefferson, who had 
just returned from France, conspicuous in his red 
waistcoat and breeches, the fashion of Versailles. 
Opposite sat Mrs. Adams, with her cheerful, in- 
telligent face. She was placed between the Count 
du Moustier, the French Ambassador, in his red- 
-?- 114-H 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

heeled shoes and earrings, and the grave, polite, 
and formally bowing Mr. Van Birket, the learned 
and able envoy of Holland. There, too, was 
Chancellor Livingston, then still in the prime 
of life, so deaf as to make conversation with him 
difficult, yet so overflowing with wit, eloquence 
and information that while listening to him the 
difficulty was forgotten. The rest were members 
of Congress, and of our Legislature, some of them 
no inconsiderable men. Being able to talk 
French, a rare accomplishment in America at that 
time, a place was assigned to me next the count." 
Verplanck goes on to describe the dinner. He 
says that it was a very grand affair, bountiful and 
elaborately served, but the French Ambassador 
would taste nothing. He took a spoonful or two 
of soup but refused everything else " from the 
roast beef down to the lobsters." Everyone was 
concerned, for that was a day of trenchermen, 
and only serious illness kept people from eating 
their dinners. At last the door opened and his 
own private chef, — quaintly described by Ver- 
planck as " his body-cook," — rushed into the 
room pushing the waiters right and left before 
him, and placed triumphantly upon the table an 
immense pie of game and truffles, still hot from 
the oven. This obviously had been planned as 
a pleasant surprise for the hosts. Du Moustier 
-*- 115 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

took a small helping himself and divided the 
rest among the others. The chronicler adds, " I 
can attest to the truth of the story and the excel- 
lence of the pate!" 

No one doubts the courteous intentions of the 
Count, but something tells me that that excellent 
housewife and incomparable hostess, Mistress 
Adams, was not enchanted by the unexpected 
addition to her delicious and carefully planned 
menu! 

It is Verplanck, by the bye, who has put in a 
peculiarly succinct way one of the most signal 
characteristics of New York — its lightning-like 
evolution. 

" In this city especially," he says, " the progress 
of a few years effect what in Europe is the work 
of centuries." A shrewd and happily tongued 
observer, is Mr. Verplanck; we shall have occa- 
sion, I believe, to refer to him again. 

The Adams' occupancy of Richmond Hill 
House was, we must be convinced, a very happy 
one. It was a house of a flexible and versatile 
personality, a beautiful home, an important head- 
quarters of many state affairs, a brilliant social 
nucleus. Washington and his wife often went 
there to call in their beloved post-chaise, and there 
was certainly no dignitary of the time and the 
place who was not at one time or another a guest 

■*- Il6-4- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

there. In the course of time, the Adamses went 
to a new and fine dwelling at Bush Hill on the 
Schuylkill. And dear Mistress Abigail, faithful 
to the house of her heart, wrote wistfully of her 
just-acquired home: 

" It is a beautiful place, but the grand and 
sublime I left at Richmond Hill "... 

In 1797, the house went to a rich foreigner 
named Temple. I quote the chronicles of old 
New York, but can give you little information 
concerning this gentleman. The only thing at 
all memorable or interesting about him seems to 
have been the fact that he was robbed of a large 
quantity of money and valuables while at the 
Hill, that the thieves were never discovered and 
that for this reason at least he filled the local press 
for quite a time. His occupancy seems to have 
been short, and, save for the robbery, uneventful 
(if he really was a picturesque and adventurous 
soul, I humbly ask pardon of his ghost, but this 
is all I can find out about him!) — for it was in 
that self-same year that the Burrs came to live 
at Richmond Hill, and Temple passed into ob- 
scurity as far as New York history is concerned. 

Mrs. Burr, that older Theodosia who was the 
idol of Aaron Burr's life, had died three years 
+- 117 -+■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

before, and little Theo was now the head of his 
household. Have you ever read the letters that 
passed between these three, by the bye? They 
are so quaint, so human, so tender — I believe that 
you will agree with me that such reading has 
more of charm in it than the most dramatic mod- 
ern novel. They bemoan their aches and pains 
and cheer each other up as though they were all 
little Theo's age. " Passed a most tedious night," 
writes Mrs. Burr, and adds that she has bought 
a pound of green tea for two dollars! And — 
" Ten thousand loves. Toujours la voire Theo- 
dosia." 

Burr writes that he has felt indisposed, but is 
better, thanks to a draught " composed of lauda- 
num, nitre and other savoury drugs." When their 
letters do not arrive promptly they are in despair. 
"Stage after stage without a line!" complains 
Theodosia the mother, in one feverishly inco- 
herent note. And Theodosia the daughter, even 
at nine years old, had her part in this corre- 
spondence. 

Her father writes her that from the writing on 
her last envelope, he thought the letter must come 
from some "great fat fellow"! He advises her 
to write a little smaller, and says he loves to hear 
from her. Then he whimsically reproaches her 
for not saying a word about his last letter to her, 
■*- 118 -+■ 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

nor answering a single one of his questions: 
" That is not kind — it is scarcely civil!" 

When little Theodosia was eleven her mother 
died, and henceforward she was her father's 
housekeeper and dearest companion. She is said 
to have been beautiful, brilliant and fascinating 
even from her babyhood, and certainly the way in 
which she took charge of Richmond Hill at the 
age of fourteen would have done credit to a 
woman with at least another decade to her credit. 

Burr had a beautiful city house besides the one 
on the Hill, but he and Theo both preferred the 
country place, and they entertained there as lav- 
ishly as the Adamses before them. Burr had a 
special affection for the French, and his house 
was always hospitably open to the expatriated 
aristocrats during the French Revolution. Vol- 
ney stopped with him, and Talleyrand, and Louis 
Philippe himself. Among the Americans his 
most constant guests were Dr. Hosack, the 
Clintons, and, oddly enough, Alexander Hamil- 
ton! Hamilton, one imagines, found Burr per- 
sonally interesting, though he had small use for 
his politics, and warned people against him as 
being that dangerous combination: a daring and 
adventurous spirit, quite without conservative 
principles or scruples. 

Burr is described by one biographer as being 
•*- 119 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

" a well-dressed man, polite and confident, with 
hair powdered and tied in a queue." He stooped 
slightly, and did not move with the grace or ease 
one would have expected from so experienced a 
soldier, but he had " great authority of manner," 
and was uniformly " courtly, witty and charm- 
ing." During one of those legal battles in which 
he had only one rival (Hamilton) it was re- 
ported of him that " Burr conducted the trial 
with the dignity and impartiality of an angel 
but with the rigour of a devil! " 

Gen. Prosper M. Wetmore, who adores his 
memory and can find extenuation for anything 
and everything he did, writes this charming 
tribute: 

"Born, as it seemed, to adorn society; rich in 
knowledge; brilliant and instructive in conversa- 
tion; gifted with a charm of manner that was 
almost irresistible; he was the idol of all who 
came within the magic sphere of his friendship 
and his social influence." 

His enthusiastic historians fail to add that, 
though he does not seem to have been at all hand- 
some, he was always profoundly fascinating to 
women. It is doubtful (in spite of his second 
marriage at seventy odd) if he ever loved anyone 

•+- 120 -f- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

very deeply after his wife Theodosia's death, but 
it is very certain indeed that a great, great many 
loved him! 

Richmond Hill was the scene of one exceed- 
ingly quaint incident during the very first year 
that Burr and his young daughter lived in it. 

Burr was in Philadelphia on political business, 
and fourteen-year-old Theo was in charge in the 
great house on the Hill a mile and a half from 
New York. Imagine any modern father leaving- 
his little girl behind in a more or less remote 
country place with a small army of servants under 
her and full and absolute authority over them 
and herself! But I take it that there are not 
many modern little girls like Theodosia Burr. 
Certainly there are very few who could translate 
the American Constitution into French, and 
Theo did that while she was still a slip of a girl, 
merely to please her adored father! 

Which is a digression. 

In some way Burr had made the acquaintance 
of the celebrated Indian Chief of the Mohawks, 
Tha-yen-da-ne-gea. He was intelligent, educated 
and really a distinguished orator, and Burr took 
a great fancy to him. The Chief had adopted 
an American name, — Joseph Brant, — and had ac- 
quired quite a reputation. He was en route for 
Washington, but anxious to see New York before 
.-*- 121 r*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

he went. So Burr sent him to Richmond Hill, 
and gave him a letter to present to Theo, saying 
that his daughter would take care of him! 
The letter runs: 

". . . This will be handed to you by Colonel 
Brant, the celebrated Indian Chief. . . . He is 
a man of education. . . . Receive him with re- 
spect and hospitality. He is not one of those 
Indians who drink rum, but is quite a gentleman; 
not one who will make you fine bows, but one 
who understands and practises what belongs to 
propriety and good-breeding. He has daughters 
— if you could think of some little present to send 
to one Of them (a pair of earrings for example) 
it would please him. ..." 

Even the prodigiously resourceful Theo was a 
bit taken aback by this sudden proposition. In 
the highly cosmopolitan circle that she was used 
to entertaining, she so far had encountered no 
savages, and, in common with most young people, 
she thought of "Brant" as a fierce barbarian 
who, — her father's letter notwithstanding, — prob- 
ably carried a tomahawk and would dance a war 
dance in the stately hallway of Richmond Hill. 

In her letter to her father, written after she 
had met Brant and made him welcome, she ad- 

-i- 122 -J- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

mitted that she had been paramountly worried 
about what she ought to give him to eat. She 
declared that her mind was filled with wild ideas 
of (and she quotes) : 

" ' The Cannibals that each other eat, 

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders! ' " 

She had, she confesses, a vague notion that all 
savages ate human beings, and, — though this 
obviously was intended as a touch of grisly 
humour, — had half a notion to procure a human 
head and have it served up in state after the 
mediaeval fashion of serving boars' heads in Old 
England! 

However, she presented him with a most up- 
to-date and epicurean banquet, and had the wit 
and good taste to include in her dinner party 
such representative men as Bishop Moore, Dr. 
Bard and her father's good friend Dr. Hosack, 
the surgeon. 

When the party was over she wrote Burr quite 
enthusiastically about the Indian Chief, and de- 
clared him to have been " a most Christian and 
civilised guest in his manners!" 

There were no ladies at Theo's dinner party. 
She lived so much among men, and so early 
-*- 123 -?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

learned to take her place as hostess and woman 
that I imagine she would have had small patience 
with the patronage and counsel of older members 
of her sex. That she was extravagantly popular 
with men old and young is proved in many ways. 
Wherever she went she was a belle. Whether the 
male beings she met chanced to be young and 
stupid or old and wise, there was something for 
them to admire in Theo, for she was both beau- 
tiful and witty, and she had something of her 
father's " confidence of manner " which won ad- 
herents right and left. 

Mayor Livingston took her on board a frigate 
in the harbour one day, and warned her to leave 
her usual retainers behind. 

" Now, Theodosia," he admonished her with 
affectionate raillery, " you must bring none of 
your sparks on board! They have a magazine 
there, and we should all be blown up! " 

In 1801, when she was eighteen years old, the 
lovely Theo married Joseph Alston, an immensely 
rich rice planter from South Carolina, owner of 
more than a thousand slaves, and at one time 
governor of his state. Though she went to the 
South to live, she never could bear to sever en- 
tirely her relations with Richmond Hill. It is 
a curious fact that everyone who ever lived there 
loved it best of all the places in the world. 

-i- 124 -+• 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

One year after her marriage Theo came on to 
New York for a visit — I suppose she stopped at 
her father's town house, since it was in spring, 
and before the country places would naturally be 
open. At all events it was during this visit that, 
fresh from her rice fields (which never agreed 
with her), she wrote in a letter: 

". . .1 have just returned from a ride in the 
country and a visit to Richmond Hill. Never 
did I behold this island so beautiful. The variety 
of vivid greens, the finely cultivated fields and 
gardens, the neat, cool air of the cit's boxes peep- 
ing through straight rows of tall poplars, and the 
elegance of some gentlemen's seats, commanding 
a view of the majestic Hudson, and the high, dark 
shores of New Jersey, altogether form a scene so 
lovely, so touching, and to me so new, that I 
was in constant rapture." 

In 1804 came the historic quarrel between 
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Since 
this chapter is the story of Richmond Hill and 
not the life of Aaron Burr, I shall not concern 
myself with the whys or the wherefores of that 
disastrous affair. 

Histories must perforce deal with the political 
aims, successes and failures of men; must cover a 
-i- 125 -e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

big canvas and sing a large and impersonal song. 
But just here we have only to think of these old- 
time phantoms of ours as they affect or are 
affected by the old-time regions in which for the 
nonce we are interested. To Richmond Hill — 
with its white columns and shadow-flinging por- 
tico, its gardens and its oak trees and its silver 
pond — it was of small import that the master 
just missed being President of the United States, 
that he did become Vice-president, and President 
of the Senate, and that he was probably as able 
a jurist as ever distinguished the Bar of New 
York; also that he made almost as many enemies 
as he did friends. But it was decidedly the con- 
cern of the sweet and imposing old house on 
Richmond Hill that it was from its arms, so to 
speak, that he went out in a cold, white rage 
to the duel with his chief enemy; that he returned, 
broken and heartsick, doubly defeated in that he 
had chanced to be the victor, to the protection 
of Richmond Hill. 

I cannot help believing that the household 
gods of a man take a very special interest and a 
very personal part in what fortunes befall him. 
More than any deities of old, they live with and 
in him; they at once go forth with him to battle, 
and welcome him home. I can conceive of some 
hushed and gracious home-spirit walking restless 
-e- 126 -f- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILE 

by night because the heart and head of the house 
was afar or in danger. And a house so charged 
with personality as that on Richmond Hall must 
have had many a ghost, — of fireside and of 
garden close, — who wept for fallen fortunes as 
they had rejoiced for gaiety and bright enter- 
prise. 

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were 
born antagonists: their personalities, their ideals, 
their methods, were as diverse and as implacably 
divergent as the poles. Hamilton, as a statesman, 
believed that Burr was dangerous; and so he was: 
sky rockets and geniuses usually are. Hamilton 
did his brilliant best to destroy the other's power 
(it was chiefly due to his efforts that Burr missed 
the Presidency), and, being a notably courageous 
man, he was not afraid to go on warning America 
against him. 

And so it all came about: — the exchange of 
letters — haughty, courteously insolent, utterly un- 
yielding on both sides — then the challenge, and 
finally the duel. 

I am glad to think that Theo Alston was safe 
among her husband's rice fields at that time. She 
worshipped her father, and everything that hurt 
him stabbed her to her devoted heart. 

It was in an early, fragrant dawn — Friday the 
sixth of July, 1804 — that Burr and his seconds 
•4- 127-?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

left our beautiful Richmond Hill, where the birds 
were singing and the pond just waking to the 
morning light, for Weehawken Heights on the 
Jersey shore. 

At about seven, Burr reached the ground which 
had been appointed. Just after came Hamilton 
with his seconds, and the surgeon, Dr. Hosack. 
The distance was punctiliously measured, and 
these directions read solemnly to the princi- 
pals: 

" The parties, being placed at their stations, 
shall present and fire when they please. If one 
fires before the other, the opposite second shall 
say i — 2 — 3 — fire; and he shall then fire or lose 
his fire." 

Then came the word " Present!" from one of 
the witnesses. Both duellists fired and Hamilton 
dropped. Burr was untouched. He stood for a 
second looking at his fallen adversary, and then 
(as the story goes), "with a gesture of profound 
regret, left the ground. ..." 

Back to Richmond Hill and the troubled house- 
hold gods. Burr was no butcher, and he did not 
dislike Hamilton personally. I wonder how 
many times he paced the cool dining-room with 
the balcony outside, and how many times he re- 
fused meat or drink, before he despatched his 
note to Dr. Hosack? Here it is: 
-t- 128 -J- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

" Mr. Burr's respectful compliments. — He re- 
quests Dr. Hosack to inform him of the present 
state of General H., and of the hopes which 
are entertained of his recovery. 

" Mr. Burr begs to know at what hour of the 
day the Dr. may most probably be found at home, 
that he may repeat his enquiries. He would take 
it very kind if the Dr. would take the trouble 
of calling on him, as he returns from Mr. 
Bayard's." 

On the thirteenth, the New York Herald pub- 
lished: 

" With emotions that we have not a hand to 
inscribe, have we to announce the death of 
Alexander Hamilton. 

" He was suddenly cut off in the forty-eighth 
year of his age, in the full vigour of his faculties 
and in the midst of all his usefulness." 

The inquest which followed presented many 
and mixed views. Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, writ- 
ing in 1835, and evidently a somewhat prejudiced 
friend, says that " the jury of inquest at last were 
reluctantly dragooned into a return of murder." 

Meanwhile, for eleven long black days, Burr 
stayed indoors at Richmond Hill. He was afraid 
to go out, for he knew that popular feeling was, 
■*- 129 -?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

in the main, against him. Dark times for the 
household gods! At last, one starless, cloudy 
night, having heard of the murder verdict, he 
stole away. 

His faithful servant and friend, John Swart- 
wout, went with him, and a small barge lay wait- 
ing for him on the Hudson just below his Rich- 
mond Hill estate, with a discreet crew. They 
rowed all night, and at breakfast time, he turned 
up at the country place of Commodore Truxton, 
at Perth Amboy. 

Haggard and worn, he greeted his friend the 
Commodore with all his usual sang-froid, and 
suggested nonchalantly that he had " spent the 
night on the water, and a dish of coffee would 
not come amiss! " 

He never went back to Richmond Hill to live 
again, though he later returned to New York and 
dwelt there for many years. He went, for a 
time, to Theo in the South, fearing arrest, but as 
a matter of fact, verdict or no verdict, the matter 
of Hamilton's death was never followed up. Burr 
came calmly back to the Capitol and finished 
his term as Vice-president. In his farewell 
speech to the Senate he said he did not remember 
the names of all the people who had slandered 
him and intrigued against him, since " he thanked 
God he had no memory for injuries! " 
-*- 130 -+■ 





THE BUTTERICK BUILDING 

A stone's throw from the site of the once-glorious 
house of Richmond Hill 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

The year after the duel he evolved his mon- 
strous and hare-brained plan of establishing a 
Southern Republic with New Orleans as Capital 
and himself as President. Mexico was in it too. 
In fact, President Jefferson himself wrote of the 
project: "He wanted to overthrow Congress, 
corrupt the navy, take the throne of Monte- 
zuma and seize New Orleans. ... It is the 
most extraordinary since the days of Don 
Quixote! ..." 

General Wetmore loyally declares the scheme 
to have been " a justifiable enterprise for the con- 
quest of one of the provinces of Southern Amer- 
ica." But no one in the whole world really knows 
all about it. The sum of the matter is that he was 
tried for treason, and that, though he was ac- 
quitted, he was henceforward completely dead 
politically. Through all, Theo stood by him, and 
her husband too. They went to prison with him, 
and shared all his humiliation and disappoint- 
ment. Affection? Blind, confident adoration? 
Never was man born who could win it more com- 
pletely ! 

But America as a whole did not care for him 
any more. Dr. Hosack loaned him money, and, 
after his acquittal, he set sail for England, and 
let Richmond Hill be sold to John Jacob Astor 
by his creditors. It brought only $25,000, which 
-*- 131-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

was a small sum compared to what he owed, so 
he had another object in staying on the other 
side of the water: a quite lively chance of the 
Debtors' Prison! 

Apropos of this, there is one rather human 
little tale which is comforting to read, dropped 
down, as it is, in the middle of so wildly brilliant 
a career, so colossally disastrous a destiny. 

While Burr was living at Richmond Hill, he 
was often obliged to take coach journeys to out- 
side points. One day he was on his way home 
from Albany and stopped at a roadhouse at King- 
ston. While he was eating and drinking and the 
horses were being changed, he saw a drawing 
which interested him. He asked to see more by 
the same artist, for he had a keen appreciation 
of skill in all lines. 

This and the other sketches shown him were 
the work of a young fellow called John Van- 
derlyn, who shortly was summoned to meet the 
great Burr. The lad was apprenticed to a wagon- 
maker, and had absolutely no prospects nor any 
hope of cultivating his undoubted talent. Like 
any other boy young and poor and in a position 
so humble as to offer no opportunity of improve- 
ment, he was even afraid of change, and seemed 
unwilling to take the plunge of leaving his master 
and taking his chance in the great world. 
-*- 132 -*■ 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

" Very well," said Burr. " When you change 
your mind, just put a clean shirt in your pocket, 
come to New York and asked for Colonel Burr." 

Then he dismissed the boy from his presence 
and the whole episode from his mind, got into 
his coach and continued on his way. 

Two months later he was at breakfast in the 
dining-room at Richmond Hill, — with Theo 
probably pouring out his " dish of coffee," — when 
a vast disturbance arose downstairs. A roughly 
dressed lad had presented himself at the front 
door and insisted on seeing Colonel Burr, in spite 
of all the resistance of his manservant. At last 
he succeeded in forcing his way past, and made 
his appearance in the breakfast-room, followed 
by the startled and indignant servant. Burr did 
not recognise him in the least, but the youth 
walked up to him, pulled a shirt — of country 
make but quite clean — out of his coat pocket, 
and held it out. 

Immediately it all came back to Burr, and he 
was delighted by the simplicity with which the 
wagon-maker's apprentice had taken him at his 
word. No one could play the benefactor more 
generously when he chose, and he lost no time in 
sending Vanderlyn to Paris to study art. So 
brilliantly did the young man acquit himself in 
the ateliers there that within a very few years 
•*- 133-*" 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

he was the most distinguished of all American 
painters in Europe. In Henry Brevoort's Letters 
are references to his commission to paint General 
Jackson, among others. 

And now comes the pleasant part of this little 
story within a story: 

In 1808, Aaron Burr was an exile in London. 
His trouble with Hamilton, his mad scheme of 
empire and trial for treason, his political un- 
popularity, had made him an outcast; and at 
that time, he, the most fascinating, and at one 
time the most courted of men, lived and moved 
without a friend. And he met Vanderlyn, — once 
the wistful lad who drew pictures when his 
master wanted him to turn spokes. Now Van- 
derlyn was a big man, with a name in the world 
and money in his pocket, and — Aaron Burr's 
warm and grateful friend. Burr was living in 
lodgings at eight shillings a week at that time, 
and his only caller was John Vanderlyn. 

In 1 8 12 it seemed safe, even advisable, for the 
exile to return to America again, but where was 
the money to be found? He was penniless. Well, 
the money was found quite easily. Vanderlyn 
made a pile of all his best canvases, sold them, 
and handed over the proceeds to his friend and 
erstwhile benefactor. And so Burr came home 
to America. 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

I think the nicest part of all this is Vander- 
lyn's loyal silence about the older man's affairs. 
It is likely that he knew more about Burr's 
troubles and perplexities and mistakes than any 
other man, but he was fiercely reticent on the 
subject. Once a writer approached Vanderlyn 
for some special information. It was after Burr's 
death, and the scribe had visions of publishing 
something illuminating about this most mysterious 
and inscrutable genius. 

" And now about Burr's private life," he in- 
sinuated confidentially. 

The artist turned on him savagely. 

"You let Burr's private life alone!" he 
snarled. 

The author fled, deciding that he certainly 
would do just that! 

Burr came home. But fate was not through 
with him yet. Dear Theo set sail without delay, 
from South Carolina, to meet her father in New 
York. He had been gone years, and she was 
hungry for the sight of him. Her little son had 
died, and father and daughter longed to be to- 
gether again. 

Her boat was the Patriot — and the Patriot has 
never been heard from since she put out. She was 
reported sunk off Cape Hatteras, but for many 
years a haunting report persisted that she had been 

-*- 135 -«- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

captured by the pirates that then infested coast- 
wise trade. So Theodosia — barely thirty years 
old — vanished from the world so far as we may 
know. The dramatic and tragic mystery of her 
death seems oddly in keeping with her life and 
that of her father. Somehow one could scarcely 
imagine Theo growing old peacefully on a South- 
ern plantation! 

Her father never regained his old eagerness 
for life after her loss. He lived for years, prac- 
tised law once more with distinction and success 
on Nassau Street, even made a second marriage 
very late in life, but I think some vivid, vital, 
romantic part of him, something of ambition and 
fire and adventure, was lost at sea with his child 
Theodosia. 

And now shall we go back, for a few moments 
only, to Richmond Hill? 

Counsellor Benson (or Benzon) is generally 
supposed to have been the last true-blue celebrity 
to inhabit the famous old house. He was Gov- 
ernor of the Danish Islands, and an eccentric. 
Our old friend Verplanck says that he himself 
dined there once with thirteen others, all speaking 
different languages. ..." None of whom I 
ever saw before," he states, " but all pleasant fel- 
lows. ... I, the only American, the rest of 
every different nation in Europe and no one the 
■*- 136-?- 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

same, and all of us talking bad French together! " 
It was soon after this that the city began cut- 
ting up old lots into new, and turning what had 
been solitary country estates into gregarious sub- 
urbs and, soon, metropolitan sections. Among 
other strange performances, they levelled the hills 
of New York — is it not odd to remember that 
there once were hills, many hills, in New York? 
And right and left they did their commissioner- 
like best to cut the town all to one pattern. Of 
course they couldn't, quite, but the effort was of 
lasting and painfully efficacious effect. They 
could not find it in their hearts, I suppose, to raze 
Richmond Hill House completely, — it was a 
noble landmark, and a home of memories which 
ought to have given even commissioners pause, — 
and maybe did. But they began to lower it — yes : 
take it down literally. No one with an imagina- 
tive soul can fail to feel that as they lowered the 
house in site and situation so they gradually but 
relentlessly permitted it to be lowered in char- 
acter. It is with a distinct pang that I recall the 
steps of Richmond Hill's decline: material and 
spiritual, its two-sided fall appears to have kept 
step. 

A sort of degeneracy struck the erstwhile lovely 
and exclusive old neighbourhood. Such gay re- 
sorts as Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens had 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

encroached on the aristocratic regions of Lis- 
penard's Meadows and their vicinity. Brannan's 
Gardens were close to the present crossing of 
Hudson and Spring streets. And — Richmond 
Hill did not escape! It too became a tavern, a 
pleasure resort, a " mead garden," a roadhouse — 
whatever you choose to call it. It, with its con- 
temporaries, was the goal of many a gay party 
and I am told that its " turtle dinners " were in- 
comparable! In winter there were sleighing 
parties, a gentleman and lady in each sleigh; and 
— but here is a better picture-maker than I to give 
it to you — one Thomas Janvier, in short: 

" How brave a sight it must have been when — 
the halt for refreshments being ended — the long 
line of carriages got under way again and went 
dashing along the causeway over Lispenard's 
green meadows, while the silvered harness of the 
horses and the brilliant varnish of the Italian 
chaises gleamed and sparkled in the rays of 
nearly level sunshine from the sun that was set- 
ting there a hundred years and more ago!" 

The secretary and engineer to the commis- 
sioners who cut up, levelled and made over New 
York was John Randel, Jr., and he has left us 
most minute and prolific writings, covering every- 

■+- 138 -*• 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

thing he saw in the course of his work; indeed 
one wonders how he ever had time to work at all 
at his profession! Among his records is this 
account of dear Richmond Hill before it had 
been lowered to the level of the valley lands. It 
was, in fact, the last of the hills to go. 

After describing carefully the exact route he 
took daily to the Commissioners' office in Green- 
wich, as far as Varick Street where the excava- 
tions for St. John's Church were then being made 
(1808), and stating that he crossed the ditch at 
Canal Street on a plank, he goes on thus: 

" From this crossing place I followed a well- 
beaten path leading from the city to the then 
village of Greenwich, passing over open and 
partly fenced lots and fields, not at that time under 
cultivation, and remote from any dwelling-house 
now remembered by me except Colonel Aaron 
Burr's former country-seat, on elevated ground, 
called Richmond Hill, which was about one 
hundred or one hundred and fifty yards west 
of this path, and was then occupied as a place 
of refreshment for gentlemen taking a drive from 
the city." 

In 1820, if I am not mistaken, the levelling 
(and lowering) process was complete. Richmond 
-*- 139 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Hill's sad old windows looked no longer down 
upon a beautiful country world, but out on swiftly 
growing city blocks. In 1 83 1 , a few art-loving 
souls tried to found a high-class theatre in the 
old house, — the Richmond Hill Theatre. Among 
them was Lorenzo Daponte, who had been exiled 
from Venice, and wrote witty satirical verse. 

The little group of sincere idealists wanted this 
theatre to be a real home of high art, and a prize 
was offered for the best " poetical address on the 
occasion," — that is, the opening of the theatre. 
The judges and contestants sat in one of the his- 
toric reception rooms that had seen such august 
guests as Washington and Burr, Adams and Ham- 
ilton, Talleyrand and Louis Philippe. 

Our good friend General Wetmore can tell us 
of this at first hand for he was one of those 
present. 

" It was," he says, " an afternoon to be remem- 
bered. As the long twilight deepened into eve- 
ning, the shadows of departed hosts and long- 
forgotten guests seemed to hover 'round the 
dilapidated halls and the dismantled chambers." 

The winner of the prize was Fitz-Greene Hal- 
leck; and it was not at all a bad poem, though 
too long to quote here. 

The theatre was never a brilliant success. To 
be sure, such sterling actors as Mr. and Mrs. 
-h- 140 -h 



THE STORY OF RICHMOND HILL 

John Barnes and the Hilsons played there, and 
during a short season of Italian opera, in which 
Daponte was enthusiastically interested, Adelaide 
Pedrotti was the prima donna. And one of New 
York's first " opera idols " sang there — Luciano 
Fornasari, generally acclaimed by New York 
ladies as the handsomest man who had ever been 
in the city! For a wonder, he wasn't a tenor, 
only a basso, but they adored him just the same. 

Somehow it grows hard to write of Richmond 
Hill — a hill no longer, but a shabby playhouse, 
which was not even successful. The art-loving 
impresarios spent the little money they had very 
speedily and there was no more Richmond Hill 
Theatre. 

Then a circus put up there — yes, a circus — in 
the same house which had made even sensible 
Mrs. Adams dream dreams, and where Theo 
Burr had entertained her Indian Chief! In 1842, 
it was the headquarters of a menagerie, pure and 
simple. 

In 1849 — thank God — its nightmare of desecra- 
tion was over. It was pulled down, and they 
built red-brick houses on its grave and left its 
ancient memories to sleep in peace. 

" And thus " [Wetmore once again] " passed 
away the glories and the shadows of Richmond 
^F 141 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Hill. All that remains of them are a few fleeting 
memories and a page or two of history fast fading 
into oblivion." 

For once, I cannot quite agree with him — not 
when he says that. For- surely the home of so 
much romance and grandeur and charm and im- 
portance must leave something behind it other 
than a few fleeting memories and a page or two 
of history. Houses have ghosts as well as people, 
and if ever there stood a house with a person- 
ality, that was sweet, poignant and indestructible, 
it was the House on Richmond Hill. 

I, who tell you this, am very sure. Have I 
not seen it sketched in bright, shadowy lines upon 
the air above Charlton and Varick streets, — its 
white columns shining through all the modern 
city murk? Go there in the right mood and at 
the right moment, and you will see, too. 



142 



64 



Tom Paine, Infidel. " 



CHAPTER V 

" Tom Paine, Infidel." 

. . . These are the times that try men's souls. The sum- 
mer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink 
from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, 
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. ... I have 
as little superstition in me as any man living; but my secret 
opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not 
give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsup- 
portedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly 
sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method 
which wisdom could invent. — " The Crisis." 




WANT you to note carefully the title 
of this chapter. And then I want you 
to note still more carefully the quota- 
tation with which it opens. It was the 
man known far and wide as " the infidel," — the 
man who was denounced by church-goers, and 
persecuted for his unorthodox doctrines, — who 
wrote with such high and happy confidence of a 
fair, a just and a merciful God Almighty. 

Before me lies a letter from W. M. van der 
Weyde, the president of the Thomas Paine 
National Historical Association. One paragraph 
meets my eyes at this moment: 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

" Paine was, without doubt, the very biggest 
figure that ever lived in ' Greenwich Village.' I 
think, on investigation, you will realise the truth 
of this statement." 

I have realised it. And that is why I conceive 
no book on Greenwich complete without a chap- 
ter devoted to him who came to be known as 
" the great Commoner of Mankind." He spoke 
of himself as a " citizen of the world," and there 
are many quarters of the globe that can claim a 
share in his memory, so we will claim it, too! 

It is true that Thomas Paine lived but a short 
time in Greenwich, and that the long play of his 
full and colourful career was enacted before he 
came to spend his last days in the Village. But 
he is none the less an essential part of Greenwich; 
his illustrious memory is so signal a source of 
pride to the neighbourhood, his personality seems 
still so vividly present, that his life and acts must 
have a place there, too. The street that was named 
" Reason " because of him, suggests the persecu- 
tions abroad and at home which followed the 
writing of that extraordinary and daring book 
" The Age of Reason." The name of Mme. de 
Bonneville, who chose for him the little frame 
house on the site which is now about at 59 Grove 
Street, recalls his dramatic life chapter in Paris, 
-*- 146 -*- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

where he first met the De Bonnevilles. So, you 
see, one cannot write of Thomas Paine in Green- 
wich, without writing of Thomas Paine in the 
great world — working, fighting, pleading, suffer- 
ing, lighting a million fires of courage and of in- 
spiration, living so hard and fast and strenuously, 
that to read over his experiences, his experiments 
and his achievements, is like reading the biog- 
raphies of a score of different busy men! 

He was born of Quaker parentage, at Thet- 
ford, Norfolk, in England, on January 29, 1737, 
and pursued many avocations before he found his 
true vocation — that of a world liberator, and 
apostle of freedom and human rights. One of his 
most sympathetic commentators, H. M. Brails- 
ford, says of him: 

"His writing is of the age of enlightenment; 
his actions belong to romance. ... In his spirit 
of adventure, in his passion for movement and 
combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought 
in prose and acted epics. He drew horizons on 
paper and pursued the infinite in deeds." 

Let us see where this impulse of romance and 
adventure led him; it was into strange enough 
paths at first! 

He was a mere boy — fifteen or sixteen, if I 
remember accurately — when the lure of the sea 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

seized him. It is reported that he signed up on a 
privateer (the Captain of which was appropri- 
ately called Death!), putting out from England, 
and sailed with her piratical crew for a year. 
This was doubtless adventurous enough, but 
young Thomas already wanted adventure of a 
different and a higher order. He came back and 
went into his Quaker father's business — which 
was that of a staymaker, of all things! He got 
his excitement by studying astronomy! 

Then he became an exciseman — what was some- 
times called " gauger " — and was speedily cash- 
iered for negligence. Anyone may have three 
guesses as to his reported next ambition. More 
than one historian has declared that he wished to 
take orders in the Church of England. This is, 
however, extremely unlikely. In any case, he 
changed his mind in time, and was again taken on 
as exciseman. Likewise, he was again dismissed. 
This time they fired him for advocating higher 
wages and writing a pamphlet on the subject. 
The reform fever had caught him, you perceive, 
and he was nevermore free from it, to the day 
of his death. 

He was a brilliant mathematician and an in- 
genious inventor. Brailsford says that his inven- 
tions were " partly useful, partly whimsical." 
They would be, of course. They included a 
-j- 148 -*- 



. •.. ; 




i 




59 GROVE STREET 

On the site of the house where Thomas Paine died 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and 
a gunpowder motor — besides his really big and 
notable invention of the first iron bridge. 

But that came later. Before leaving England, 
in addition to his other and varied occupations, 
he ran a " tobacco mill," and was twice married. 
One wife died, and from the other he was 
separated. At all events, at thirty-seven, alone 
and friendless, with empty pockets and a letter 
from Benjamin Franklin as his sole asset, he set 
sail for America in the year 1774. 

Of course he went to the Quaker City, and 
speedily became the editor of the Pennsylvania 
Magazine, through the pages of which he cried 
a new message of liberty and justice to the 
troubled Colonies. He, an Englishman, urged 
America to break away from England; he, of 
Quaker birth and by heredity and training 
opposed to fighting, advocated the most stringent 
steps for the consummation of national freedom. 
In that clear-eyed and disinterested band of men 
who conceived and cradled our Republic, Paine 
stands a giant even among giants. 

Many persons believe that it was he who ac- 
tually composed and wrote the Declaration of 
Independence; it is certain that he is more than 
half responsible for it. The very soul and fibre 
and living spirit of the United States was the 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

soul and fibre and living spirit of Thomas Paine, 
and, in the highest American standards and tra- 
ditions, remains the same today. 

In 1775 ne wrote " Common Sense " — the book 
which was, as one historian declares, the " clarion 
call for separation from England," and which 
swept the country. Edmund Randolph drily 
ascribes American independence first to George 
III and second to Paine. Five hundred thousand 
copies of the pamphlet were sold, and he might 
easily have grown rich on the proceeds, but he 
could never find it in his conscience to make 
money out of patriotism, and he gave every cent 
to the war fund. 

This splendid fire-eating Quaker — is there any- 
thing stauncher than a fighting Quaker? — pro- 
ceeded to enlist in the Pennsylvania division of 
the Flying Camp under General Roberdeau; then 
he went as aide-de-camp to General Greene. It 
was in 1776 that he started his " Crisis," a series 
of stirring and patriotic addresses in pamphlet 
form. General Washington ordered the first copy 
read aloud to every regiment in the Continental 
Army, and its effect is now history. 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox has written of this: 

". . . Many of the soldiers were shoeless and 
left bloody footprints on the snow-covered line 

-i- I5O -fr- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

of march. All were but half-hearted at this time 
and many utterly discouraged. Washington wrote 
most apprehensively concerning the situation to 
the Congress. Paine, in the meantime (himself 
a soldier, with General Greene's army on the 
retreat from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Newark), 
realising the necessity of at once instilling re- 
newed hope and courage in the soldiers if the 
cause of liberty was to be saved, wrote by camp- 
fire at night the first number of his soul-stirring 
' Crisis.' " 

It was before Trenton that those weary and dis- 
heartened soldiers, — ragged, barefoot, half frozen 
and more than half starved — first heard the words 
that have echoed down the years : 

" These are the times that try men's souls! " 

They answered that call; every man of them 
answered Paine's heart cry, as they took up their 
muskets again. It was with that immortal sen- 
tence as a war slogan, that the Battle of Trenton 
was won. 

Is it any wonder that in England the " Crisis " 
was ordered to be burned by the hangman? It 
was a more formidable enemy than anything 
ever devised in the shape of steel or powder! 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

A list of Paine's services to this country would 
be too long to set down here. The Association 
dedicated to his memory and honour cites twenty- 
four important reasons why he stands among the 
very first and noblest figures in American history. 
And there are dozens more that they don't cite. 
He did things that were against possibility. 
When the patriot cause was weak for lack of 
money he gave a year's salary to start a bank to 
finance the army, and coaxed, commanded and 
hypnotised other people into subscribing enough 
to carry it. He went to Paris and induced the 
French King to give $6,000,000 to American in- 
dependence. He wrote " Rights of Man " and 
the " Age of Reason," — and, incidentally, was 
outlawed in England and imprisoned in France! 
He did more and received less compensation for 
what he did, either in worldly goods or in grati- 
tude, than any figure in relatively recent 
history. 

America, though — I hear you say! — America, 
for whom he fought and laboured and sacrificed 
himself: she surely appreciated his efforts? 
Listen. On his return from Europe, America 
disfranchised him, ostracised him and repudiated 
him, refusing, among other indignities, to let him 
ride in public coaches. 

So be it. He is not the first great man who 
-*- 152-?- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

has found the world thankless. Oddly enough, it 
troubled him little in comparison with the satis- 
faction he felt in seeing his exalted projects meet 
with success. So that good things were effectually 
accomplished, he cared not a whit who got the 
credit. 

In reference to the charges against him of 
being " an infidel," or guilty of " infidelity," he 
himself, with that straightforward and happy con- 
fidence which made some men call him a brag- 
gart, wrote: 

" They have not yet accused Providence of In- 
fidelity. Yet, according to their outrageous piety, 
she (Providence) must be as bad as Thomas 
Paine; she has protected him in all his dangers, 
patronised him in all his undertakings, encour- 
aged him in all his ways. ..." 

It is true, as Mr. van der Weyde points out in 
an article in The Truth Seeker (N. Y.), that a 
most extraordinary and beneficent luck, — or was 
it rather a guardian angel? — stood guard over 
Paine. His narrow escapes from death would 
make a small book in themselves. I will only 
mention one here. 

During his imprisonment in the Luxembourg 
Prison in Paris, Thomas Paine was one of the 
-*- 153 -+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

many who were sentenced to be guillotined at 
that period when the moral temperature of France 
was many degrees above the normal mark, and 
men doled out death more freely than sous. It 
was the custom among the jailers to make a chalk 
mark upon the door of each cell that held a man 
condemned. Paine was one of a " consignment " 
of one hundred and sixty-eight prisoners sen- 
tenced to be beheaded at dawn, and the jailer 
made the fateful chalk mark upon his door along 
with the others, that the guards would know he 
was destined for the tumbrel that rolled away from 
the prison hour by hour all through the night. 
But his door chanced to be open, so that the mark, 
hastily made, turned out to be on the wrong 
side! When the door was closed it was inside, 
and no one knew of it; so the guard passed on, 
and Paine lived. 

It is interesting but difficult to write about 
Thomas Paine. 

The trouble about him is that his personality 
is too overwhelming to be cut and measured in 
proper lengths by any writer. He does not lend 
himself, like lesser historical figures, to con- 
tinuous or disinterested narrative. The authors 
who have been rash enough to try to tell some- 
thing about him can no more pick and choose the 
incidents of his career that will make the most 
+- 154 -+ 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

effective " stuff " than they could reduce the 
phenomena of a cyclone or the aurora borealis to 
a consistent narrative form. 

Thus: One starts to speak of Paine's experi- 
ences in Paris, and brings up in New Rochelle; 
one endeavours to anchor him in Greenwich, only 
to find oneself trailing his weary but stubborn 
footsteps in the war! And always and forever, 
Paine himself persists in crowding out the legiti- 
mate sequence of his adventures. No one can 
soberly write the story of his life; one can, at 
best, only achieve a diatribe or an apotheosis! 

Said he: 

" The sun needs no inscription to distinguish 
him from darkness." 

This quotation might almost serve as a text 
for the life of Paine, might it not? And yet — 
there are people in the world who wear smoked 
glasses, through which, I imagine, the sun him- 
self looks not unlike a muddy splash of yellow 
paint upon the heavens! 

This is a book about Greenwich Village and 
not a defence of Thomas Paine. Yet, since the 
reader has come with me thus far, I. am going 
to take advantage of his courteous attention for 
just another moment of digression. Here is my 
+- 155-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

promise: that it shall take up a small, small 
space. 

Small insects sting dangerously; and on occa- 
sion, a very trivial and ill-considered word or 
phrase will cling closer and longer than a serious 
or thoughtful judgment. When Theodore Roose- 
velt called Thomas Paine " a filthy little Atheist " 
(or was the adjective " dirty"? I really forget!) 
he was very young, — only twenty-eight, — and 
doubtless had accepted his viewpoint of the great 
reformer-patriot from that " hearsay upon hear- 
say " against which Paine himself has so urgently 
warned us. Of course Mr. Roosevelt, who is both 
intellectual and broad-minded, knows better than 
that today. But it is astonishing how that ridi- 
culous and unsuitable epithet — (a "trinity of 
lies" as one historian has styled it) — has stuck 
to a memory which I am sure is sacred to any 
angels who may be in heaven! 

"Atheist" is a word which could be applied 
to few men less suitably than to Paine. From 
first to last, he preached the goodness of God, 
the power of God, the justice and mercy and in- 
fallibility of God; and he lived in a profound 
trust in and love for God, and a hopeful and cou- 
rageous effort to carry out such principles of 
moral and national right-doing as he believed 
to be the will of his beloved Creator. 
-*- 156 -*- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

" If this," as one indignant enthusiast ex- 
claimed, " is to be an Atheist, then Jesus Christ 
must have been an Atheist! " 

As incongruous as anything else, in the judg- 
ment of Paine, is the fact that he has, apparently, 
been adopted by the pacifists. The pacifists and 
— Paine! — Paine who never in all his seventy 
years was out of a scrap! They could scarcely 
have chosen a less singularly unfit guiding star, 
for Paine was a confirmed fighter for anything 
and everything he held right. And his militancy 
was not merely of action but of the soul, not 
only of policy or necessity but of spiritual con- 
viction. When even Washington was inclined 
to submit patiently a bit longer, it was Paine who 
lashed America into righteous war. He fought 
for the freedom of the country, for the abolition 
of slavery, for the rights of women; he fought for 
old-age pensions, for free public schools, for the 
protection of dumb animals, for international 
copyright; for a hundred and one ideals of equity 
and humanity which today are legislature. And 
he fought with his body and his brain; with his 
" flaming eloquence " and also with a gun! Once 
let him perceive the cause to be a just one, and — 
I know of no more magnificently belligerent a 
figure in all history. 

And yet note here the splendid, the illuminating 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

paradox: Paine abhorred war. Every truly great 
fighter has abhorred war, else he were not truly 
great. In 1778, in the very thick of the Revo- 
lution, he wrote solemnly: 

" If there is a sin superior to every other, it is 
that of wilful and offensive war. . . . He who 
is the author of a war lets loose the whole con- 
tagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a 
nation to death." (A copy of this, together with 
the President's recent message, might advan- 
tageously be sent to a certain well-known address 
on the other side of the world!) Yet did Paine, 
with this solemn horror of war, suggest that the 
United States stop righting? No more than he 
had suggested that they keep out of trouble in 
the first place. Paine hated war in itself; but 
he held war a proper and righteous means to 
noble ends. 

Consistency is not only the bugbear of little 
minds; it is also the trade-mark of them. Paine 
also detested monarchies. " Some talent is ire- 
quired to be a simple workman," he wrote; "to 
be a king there is need to have only the human 
shape." Of Burke, he said: "Mr. Burke's mind 
is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He 
can feel only for a king or a queen. . . . He 
pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird." 

Yet when he was a member of that French 
-*- 158 -*• 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

Assembly that voted King Louis to death, he 
fought the others fiercely, — even though unable to 
speak French, — persistently opposing them, with 
a passionate determination and courage which 
came near to costing him his life. For, as Brails- 
ford says, " The Terror made mercy a traitor." 

Are these things truly paradoxes, or are they 
rather manifestations of that God-given reason 
which can clearly see things as they are as well 
as things as they should be, and see both to good 
and helpful purpose? 

In 1802 Paine returned to America, just sixty- 
five years old. He had suffered terribly, had 
rendered great services and it was at least reason- 
able that he should expect a welcome. What 
happened is tersely told by Rufus Rockwell 
Wilson: 

" When, at the age of sixty-five, he came again 
to the nation he had helped to create, he was 
met by the new faces of a generation that knew 
him not, and by the cold shoulders, instead of 
the outstretched hands, of old friends. This was 
the bitter fruit of his ' Age of Reason,' which re- 
mains of all epoch-making books the one most 
persistently misquoted and misunderstood; for 
even now there are those who rate it as scoffing 
and scurrilous, whereas its tone throughout is 
-*- 159 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

noble and reverent, and some of the doctrines 
which it teaches are now recognised as not inimi- 
cal to religion." 

Brailsford, of a more picturesque turn of 
phrase, says that " slave-owners, ex-royalists, and 
the fanatics of orthodoxy " were against him, and 
adds: 

" . . . The grandsons of the Puritan Colo- 
nists who had flogged Quaker women as witches 
denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an 
offended God should strike it with lightning." 

The state of New York, in a really surprising 
burst of generosity, presented him a farm in New 
Rochelle, and then, lest he imagine the Govern- 
ment too grateful, took away his right to vote 
there. They offered the flimsy excuse that he was 
a French citizen, — which, of course, he wasn't, — 
but it was all part of the persecution inspired by 
organised bigotry and the resentful conservative 
interests which he had so long and so unflaggingly 
attacked. 

And so at last to Greenwich Village! Though 
I cannot engage that we shall not step out of it 
before we are through. 

Thomas Paine was old and weary with his 
■*- i6oh- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

arduous and honourable years when he came to 
live in the little frame house on Herring Street, 
kept by one Mrs. Ryder. 

John Randel, Jr., engineer to the Commis- 
sioners who were at work re-cutting New York, 
has given us this picture of Paine: 

" I boarded in the city, and in going to the 
office almost daily passed the house in Herring 
Street " [now No. 309 Bleecker Street] " where 
Thomas Paine resided, and frequently in fair 
weather saw him sitting at the south window of 
the first-story room of that house. The sash was 
raised, and a small table or stand was placed 
before him with an open book upon it which he 
appeared to be reading. He had his spectacles 
on, his left elbow rested upon the table or stand, 
and his chin rested between thumb and fingers of 
his hand; his right hand lay upon his book, and 
a decanter next his book or beyond it. I never 
saw Thomas Paine at any other place or in any 
other position." 

In this house Paine was at one time desperately 
ill. It was said that the collapse was partly due 
to his too sudden abstinence from stimulants. He 
was an old man then, and had lived with every 
ounce of energy that was in him. The stimulants 
-*- 161 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

were resumed, and he grew somewhat better. 
This naturally brings us to the question of Paine 
as an excessive drinker. Of course people said 
he was; but then people said he was a great 
many things that he was not. When his enemies 
grew tired of the monotony of crying " Tom 
Paine, the infidel," they cried " Tom Paine, the 
drunkard " instead. 

Which recalls a story which is an old one but 
too applicable not to be quoted here. 

It is said that some official — and officious — mis- 
chief-maker once came to Lincoln with the report 
that one of the greatest and most distinguished of 
Federal generals was in the habit of drinking 
too much. 

" Indeed?" said Lincoln drily. "If that is 
true, I should like to send a barrel of the same 
spirits to some of my other generals." 

If Thomas Paine did drink to excess — which 
seems extremely doubtful — it's a frightful and 
solemn argument against Prohibition! 

Mrs. Ryder's house where Paine lived was 
close to that occupied by his faithful friend Mme. 
de Bonneville and her two sons. Paine was de- 
voted to the boys, indeed the younger was named 
for him, and their visits were among his great- 
est pleasures. And, by the bye, while we are on 
the subject, the most scurrilous and unjust report 

•+- 162 -j- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

ever circulated against this great man was that 
which cast a reflection upon the honourable and 
kindly relations existing between him and Mme. 
de Bonneville. 

In the first place, Paine had never been a man 
of light or loose morals, and it is scarcely likely 
that he should have changed his entire char- 
acter at the age of three score and ten. Mme. de 
Bonneville's husband, Nicholas, was a close friend 
of Paine in Paris, and had originally intended to 
come to America with Paine and his family. But, 
as the publisher of a highly Radical paper — the 
Bien Informe — De Bonneville was under espio- 
nage, and when the time came he was not per- 
mitted to leave France. He confided his wife 
and children to his friend, and they set sail with 
his promise to follow later. He did follow, 
when he could — Washington Irving tells of chat- 
ting with him in Battery Park — but it was too 
late for him to see the man who had proved him- 
self so true a friend to him and his. 

The older De Bonneville boy was Benjamin, 
known affectionately by his parents and Paine as 
" Bebia." He was destined to become distin- 
guished in the Civil War — Gen. Benjamin de 
Bonneville, of high military and patriotic honours. 

I said we couldn't keep to Greenwich — we have 
travelled to France and back again already! 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

You may find the house if you care to look 
for it — the very same house kept by Mrs. Ryder, 
where Thomas Paine lived more than a century 
ago. So humble and shabby it is you might pass 
it by with no more notice than you would pass a 
humble and shabby wayfarer. Its age and pic- 
turesqueness do not arrest the eye; for it isn't 
the sort of old house which by quaint lines and 
old-world atmosphere tempt the average artist 
or lure the casual poet to its praise. It is just 
a little old wooden building of another day, 
where people of modest means were wont to 
live. 

The caretaker there probably does not know 
anything about the august memory that with him 
inhabits the dilapidated rooms. He doubtless 
fails to appreciate the honour of placing his hand 
upon the selfsame polished mahogany stair rail 
which our immortal " infidel's " hand once 
pressed, or the rare distinction of reading his 
evening paper at the selfsame window where, with 
his head upon his hand, that Other was wont to 
read too, once upon a time. 

Ugly, dingy rooms they are in that house, but 
glorified by association. There is, incidentally, 
a mantelpiece which anyone might envy, though 
now buried in barbarian paint. There are gable 
windows peering out from the shingled roof. 

-*- 164 -+■ 




-T.Y..T? 



GROVE COURT 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

Some day the Thomas Paine Association will 
probably buy it, undertake the long-forgotten 
national obligation, and prevent it from crumbling 
to dust as long as ever they can. 

The caretaker keeps pets — cats and kittens and 
dogs and puppies. Once he kept pigeons too, but 
the authorities disapproved, he told me. 

" Ah, well," I said, " the authorities never have 
approved of things in this house." 

He thought me quite mad. 

Let us walk down the street toward that deli- 
cious splash of green — like a verdant spray thrown 
up from some unseen river of trees. There is, in 
reality, no river of trees; it is only Christopher 
Street Triangle, elbowing Sheridan Square. Sub- 
way construction is going on around us, but there 
clings still an old-world feeling. Ah, here we 
are — 59 Grove Street. It is a modest but a charm- 
ing little red-brick house with a brass knocker 
and an air of unpretentious, small-scale pros- 
perity. It has only been built during the last 
half-century, but it stands on the identical plot 
of ground where Paine's other Greenwich resi- 
dence once stood. It wasn't Grove Street then; 
in fact, it wasn't a street at all, but an open lot 
with one lone frame house in the middle of it. 
Here Mme. de Bonneville brought Thomas Paine 
when his age and ill health necessitated greater 
■+*• 165 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

comforts than Mrs. Ryder's lodgings could af- 
ford. 

Here he spent some peaceful months with only 
a few visitors; but those were faithful ones. One 
was Willett Hicks, the Quaker preacher, always 
a staunch friend ; another was John Wesley Jarvis, 
the American painter — the same artist who later 
made the great man's death mask. 

It was Jarvis who said: " He devoted his whole 
life to the attainment of two objects — rights of 
man and freedom of conscience." 

And, by the bye, Dr. Conway has declared that 
" his ' Rights of Man ' is now the political con- 
stitution of England, his ' Age of Reason ' is the 
growing constitution of its Church." 

In passing I must once again quote Mr. van 
der Weyde, who once said to me: " I often wonder 
just what share Mary Wollstonecraft had with 
her ' Rights of Women ' — in the inspiration of 
Paine's ' Rights of Man.' He and she, you know, 
were close friends." 

Another friend was Robert Fulton of steamboat 
fame. I have truly heard Paine enthusiasts de- 
clare that our " infidel " was the authentic in- 
ventor of the steamboat! In any case, he is known 
to have " palled " with Fulton, and certainly gave 
him many ideas. 

There were, to be sure, annoyances. He was, 
-*- 166 -J- 



"TOM PAINE, INFIDEL" 

in spite of Mme. de Bonneville's affectionate pro- 
tection, still an object of persecution. 

Two clergymen were especially tireless in their 
desire to reform this sterling reformer. I believe 
their names were Milledollar and Cunningham. 
Janvier tells this anecdote: 

" It was during Paine's last days in the little 
house in Greenwich that two worthy divines, the 
Rev. Mr. Milledollar and the Rev. Mr. Cun- 
ningham, sought to bring him to a realising sense 
of the error of his ways. Their visitation was 
not a success. ' Don't let 'em come here again,' 
he said, curtly, to his housekeeper, Mrs. Hedden, 
when they had departed; and added: 'They 
trouble me.' In pursuance of this order, when 
they returned to the attack, Mrs. Hedden denied 
them admission — saying with a good deal of piety, 
and with even more common-sense: ' If God does 
not change his mind, I'm sure no man can! ' " 

Apropos of the two houses occupied by Paine 
in our city Mr. van der Weyde has pointed out 
most interestingly the striking and almost mirac- 
ulous way in which they have just escaped de- 
struction. Paine's " Providence " has seemed to 
stand guard over the places sacred to him, just 
as it stood guard over his invaluable life. A 
•+- 167 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

dozen times 309 Bleecker Street and 59 Grove 
Street have almost gone in the relentless con- 
structive demolition of metropolitan growth and 
progress. But — they have not gone yet! 

I have said that the Grove Street house stood 
in an open lot, the centre of a block at that time. 
Just after Paine's death a street was cut through, 
called Cozine Street. Names were fleeting affairs 
in early and fast-growing New York, and the one 
street from Cozine became Columbia, then Bur- 
rows, and last of all Grove, which it remains 
today. 

Here let us make a note of one more indig- 
nity which the officially wise and virtuous ones 
were able to bestow upon their unassumingly wise 
and virtuous victim. 

The Commissioners replanning New York 
desired to pay Paine's memory a compliment and 
on opening up the street parallel with Grove, 
they called it Reason Street, for the " Age of 
Reason." This was objected to by many bigots 
(who had never read the book) and some tactful 
diplomat suggested giving it the French twist — 
Raison Street. Already they had the notion that 
French could cover a multitude of sins. Even 
this was too closely suggestive of Tom Paine, " the 
infidel," so it was shamelessly corrupted to Raisin! 
Consider the street named originally in honour 
-e- 168 -J- 



"TOM PATNE, INFIDEL" 

of the author of the " Age of Reason," eventually 
called for a dried grape! 

This too passed, and if you go down there now 
you will find it called Barrow Street. 

On the 8th of June, 1809, Thomas Paine died. 

The New York Advertiser said : " With heart- 
felt sorrow and poignant regret, we are com- 
pelled to announce to the world that Thomas 
Paine is no more. This distinguished philan- 
thropist, whose life was devoted to the cause of 
humanity, departed this life yesterday morning; 
and, if any man's memory deserves a place in the 
breast of a freeman, it is that of the deceased, for, 

" ' Take him for all in all, 

We ne'er shall look upon his like again.'" 

The funeral party consisted of Hicks, Mme. 
de Bonneville and two negroes, who loyally 
walked twenty-two miles to New Rochelle to see 
the last of the man who had always defended and 
pleaded for the rights of their pitifully misunder- 
stood and ill-treated race. 

To the end he was active for public service. 
His actual last act was to pen a letter to the 
Federal faction, conveying a warning as to the 
then unsettled situation in American and French 
commerce. Just before he had made his will. 

-i- 169 -i- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

It is in itself a composition worth copying and 
preserving. Paine could not even execute a legal 
document without putting into it something of the 
beauty of spirit and distinction of phrase for 
which he was remarkable. He had not much to 
leave, since he had given all to his country and 
his country had forgotten him in making up the 
balance; but what he had went to Mme. de 
Bonneville, for her children, that she, — let me 
quote his own words, ". . . might bring them 
well up, give them good and useful learning and 
instruct them in their duty to God and the prac- 
tice of morality." 

It continues thus: 

" I herewith take my final leave of them and 
the world. I have lived an honest and useful 
life to mankind; my time has been spent in doing 
good and I die in perfect composure and resig- 
nation to the will of my Creator God." 

Such was the last will and testament of " Tom 
Paine, Infidel." 



170 



Pages of Romance 



CHAPTER VI 

Pages of Romance 

In the resolute spirit of another Andor Andorra, the Village 
of Greenwich maintains its independence in the very midst of 
the city of New York — submitting to no more of a compromise 
in the matter of its autonomy than is evolved in the Procrus- 
tean sort of splicing which has hitched fast the extremities of 
its tangled streets to the most readily available streets in the 
City Plan. The flippant carelessness with which this apparent 
union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual sepa- 
ration. In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are 
productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the 
numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of 
communal propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred 
from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street 
crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at 
right angles — to the permanent bewilderment of nations and to 
the perennial confusion of mankind. — Thomas Janvier. 




T seems a far cry from the Greenwich 
of the last century to the Greenwich 
of this; from such quaint, garden- 
enclosed houses as the Warren home- 
stead and Richmond Hill, from the alternately 
adventurous and tranquil lives of the great men 
who used to walk its crooked streets long and 
long ago, to the Studio quarter of today. What 
+■ 173-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

tie between the Grapevine, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, 
Brannan's, and all the ancient hostelries and mead 
houses and the modern French and Italian res- 
taurants and little tea shops which are part and 
parcel of the present Village? So big did the 
gap appear to your servant, the author, so in- 
congruous the notion of uniting the old and the 
new Greenwich harmoniously that she was close 
to giving the problem up in despair and writing 
her story of Greenwich Village in two books in- 
stead of one. But — whether accidentally or by 
inspiration, who knows? — three sovereign bonds 
became accidentally plain to her. May they be 
as plain to you who read — bonds between the 
Green Village of an older day and the Bohemian 
Village of this our own day, points that the old 
and the new settlements have in common — more 
— points that show the soul and spirit of the 
Village to be one and the same, unchanged in 
the past, unchanged in the present, probably to 
be unchanged for all time. The first of these 
points I have already touched upon in an earlier 
chapter — the deathless element of romance that 
has always had its headquarters here. Every city, 
like every brain, should have a corner given over 
to dreams. Greenwich is the dream-corner of 
New York. Everyone feels it. I found an old 
article in the Tribune written by Vincent Pepe 
-*- 174 -t- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

which shows how the romance of the neighbour- 
hood has crept into bricks and stone and even 
the uncompromising prose of real estate. 

" Each one of these houses in the Village is 
from seventy-five to one hundred years old," 
writes Mr. Pepe (he might have said a hundred 
and fifty with equal accuracy in a few cases), 
" and each one of them has a history of its own, 
individually, as being one of the houses occupied 
by someone who has made American history and 
some of these houses have produced some of our 
present great men. 

" New York has nothing of the old, with the ex- 
ception of those old Colonial houses and for this 
reason we are trying to preserve them. . . . 
This is the great advantage and distinction of 
Washington Square and Greenwich Village and 
this is what has made it popular and it will be 
greater as the years go by. It will improve 
more and more with age, like an old wine. 

" There is only one old section of New York 
and that is Greenwich Village and Washington 
Square, and the public are also going to preserve 
this little part of old New York." 

Then there is that curious quality about Green- 
wich so endearing to those who know it, the 
-*- 175-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

quality of a haven, a refuge, a place of protected 
freedom. 

" It's a good thing," said a certain brilliant 
young writer-man to me, " that there's one place 
where you can be yourself, live as you will and 
work out your scheme of life without a lot of 
criticism and convention to keep tripping you up. 
The point of view of the average mortal — out in 
the city — is that if you don't do exactly as every- 
one else does there's something the matter with 
you, morally or mentally. In the Village they 
leave you in peace, and take it for granted that 
you're decent until you've blatantly proven your- 
self the opposite. I'd have lost my nerve or my 
wits or my balance or something if I hadn't had 
the Village to come and breathe in!" 

Not so different from the reputation of Old 
Greenwich, is it? — a place where the rich would 
be healed, the weary rest and the sorrowful gain 
comfort. Not so different from the lure that 
drew Sir Peter out to the Green Village between 
his spectacular and hazardous voyages; that gave 
Thomas Paine his " seven serene months " before 
death came to him; that filled the grassy lanes 
with a mushroom business-life which had fled 
before the scourge of yellow fever; not so differ- 
ent from the refreshing ease of heart that came to 
Abigail Adams and Theodosia Alston when they 

-*- 176 -j- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

came there from less comforting atmospheres. 
Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honour- 
able repute — that of being a resort and shelter 
and refuge for those upon whom the world out- 
side would have pressed too heavily. 

There is no one who has caught the inconse- 
quent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village 
better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly 
rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reck- 
less idealism of the Artists' Quarter — that haven 
for unconventional souls. 

" Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, 
We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare, 
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious; 
What care we for a dull old world censorious, 
When each is sure he'll fashion something 
glorious? " 

So we find that the romance of Colonial days 
still blooms freshly below Fourteenth Street and 
that people still rush to the Village to escape the 
world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hun- 
dred years ago. But the third and last point of 
unity is perhaps the most striking. Always, we 
know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to con- 
form to any rule of thumb. We know that when 
the Commissioners checker-boarded off the town 
-*- 177 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

they found they couldn't checker-board Green- 
wich. It was too independent and too set in its 
ways. It had its lanes and trails and cow-paths 
and nothing could induce it to become resigned to 
straight streets and measured avenues. It would 
not conform, and it never has conformed. And 
even more strenuously has its mental develop- 
ment defied the draughtsman's compass and tri- 
angle. Greenwich will not straighten its streets 
nor conventionalise its views. Its intellectual 
conclusions will always be just as unexpected as 
the squares and street angles that one stumbles on 
head first. Its habit of life will be just as weirdly 
individual as its tangled blocks. It asks nothing 
better than to be let alone. It does not welcome 
tourists, though it is hospitality itself to way- 
farers seeking an open door. It is the Village, 
and it will never, never, no never be anything 
else — the Village of the streets that wouldn't be 
straight! 

Janvier, who has already been quoted exten- 
sively, but who has written of Greenwich so well 
that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In 
addition to being hopelessly at odds with the sur- 
rounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at vari- 
ance with itself." 

New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by 
curious and indirect means, as we have seen. 
•*- 178 -+■ 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

This fact and a lively and sympathetic conscious- 
ness of it, leads often to seemingly irrelevant di- 
gressions. Yet, is it not worth a moment's pause 
to find out that the stately site of Washington 
Square North, as well as other adjacent and select 
territory, was originally the property of two 
visionary seamen; and that the present erratic 
deflection of Broadway came from one obstinate 
Dutchman's affection for his own grounds and his 
uncompromising determination to use a gun to 
defend them, even against a city? 

So, lest what follows appears to be a digression 
or an irrelevance, let me venture to remind you 
that the Village has always grown not only with 
picturesque results but by picturesque methods 
and through picturesque mediums. It is frankly, 
incurably romantic. Sir Peter Warren's estates, 
or part of them, were told off in parcels by the 
fine old custom of dice-throwing. Here is the 
official record of that episode, by the bye: 

" In pursuance of the powers given in the said 
antenuptial deeds the trustees therein named, on 
March 31, 1787, agreed upon a partition of the 
said lands, which agreement was with the appro- 
bation and consent of the cestui que trusts, to wit: 
Earl and Lady Abingdon, and Charles Fitsroy 
and Ann his wife, the said Susannah Skinner the 
-*- 179 -«- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

second not then having arrived at age. In making 
the partition, the premises were divided into 
three parts on a survey made thereof and marked 
A, B and C; and it was agreed that such parti- 
tion should be made by each of the trustees nam- 
ing a person to throw dice for and in behalf of 
their respective cestui que trusts, and that the 
person who should throw the highest number 
should have parcel A; the one who should throw 
the next highest number parcel B; and the one 
who should throw the lowest number, parcel C, — 
for the persons whom they respectively repre- 
sented; and the premises were partitioned accord- 
ingly." 

Eleventh Street was never cut through because 
old Burgher Brevoort did not want his trees cut 
down and argued conclusively with a blunder- 
buss to that effect — a final effect. It never has 
been cut through, as a matter of fact, to this day. 
And by way of evening things up, Grace Church, 
which stands almost on the disputed site, had 
for architect one James Renwick, who married 
the only daughter of Henry Brevoort himself. 
So by a queer twisted sort of law of compensation, 
the city gained rather than lost by what a certain 
disgruntled historian calls the " obstinacy of one 
Dutch householder." 

■+- 180-+- 




THE BREVOORT HOUSE 
"... The atmosphere of chivalry to women, 
friendliness to men, and courtesy to every one, which 
is, after all, just the air of France" 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

These things are all true; the most amazing 
thing about Greenwich Village is that the most 
unlikely things that you can find out about it 
are true. The obvious, every-day things that are 
easily believed are much the most likely to be 
untenable reports or the day dreams of imagina- 
tive chroniclers)/ You are safe if you believe all 
the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and im- 
possible things that come to your knowledge con- 
cerning the Village. That is its special and 
sacred privilege: to be unexpected and always 
— yes, always without exception — in the spirit 
of its irrational and sympathetic role. It 
needs Kipling's ambiguous " And when the 
thing that couldn't has occurred " for a 
motto. And yet — and yet — like all true 
nonsense, this nonsense is rooted in a 
beautiful and disconcerting compromise of 
truth. 

Cities do grow through their romances and 
their adventures. The commonplaces of life never 
opened up new worlds nor established them after; 
the prose of life never served as a song of prog- 
ress. Never a great onward movement but was 
called impossible. The things that the sane-and- 
safe gentleman accepts as good sense are not the 
things that make for growth, anywhere. And 
the principle, applied to lesser things, holds good. 
•*- 181 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Who wants to study a city's life through the 
registries of its civic diseases or cures? We want 
its romances, its exceptions, its absurdities, its 
adventures. We not only want them, we must 
have them. Despite all the wiseacres on earth 
we care more for the duel that Burr and Hamil- 
ton fought than for all their individual achieve- 
ments, good or bad. It is the theatrical change 
from the Potter's Field to the centre of fashion that 
first catches our fancy in the tale of Washington 
Square. In fact, my friend, we are, first and 
last, children addicted to the mad yet harmless 
passion of story-telling and story-hearing.. I do 
hope that, when you read these pages, you will 
remember that, and be not too stern in criticism 
of sundry vastly important historic points which 
are all forgot and left out of the scheme — ask- 
ing your pardon! 

The Village, old or new, is the home of ro- 
mance (as we have said, it is to be feared at 
least once or twice too often ere this) and it is 
for us to follow those sweet and crazy trails where 
they may chance to lead. 

Since, then, we are concerned chiefly with the 
spirit of adventure, we can hardly fail to note 
that this particular element has haunted the 
neighbourhood of Washington Square fairly con- 
sistently. 

-*- l82 H- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

If you will look at the Ratzer map you will 
see that the Elliott estate adjoined the Brevoort 
lands. It is today one of the most variously im- 
portant regions in town, embracing as it does 
both Broadway and Fifth Avenue and including 
a most lively business section and a most exclusive 
aristocratic quarter. Andrew Elliott was the son 
of Sir Gilbert Elliott, Lord Chief Justice, Clerk 
of Scotland. Andrew was Receiver General of 
the Province of New York under the Crown and 
a most loyal Royalist to the last. When the Brit- 
ish rule passed he, in common with many other 
English sympathisers, found himself in an em- 
barrassing position. The De Lanceys — close 
friends of his — lost their lands outright. But 
Elliott, like the canny Scotchman that he was, 
was determined that he would not be served the 
same way. 

To quote Mr. J. H. Henry, who now handles 
that huge property: " He must have had friends! 
Apparently they liked him, if they didn't like his 
politics." 

This is how they managed it: He transferred 
his entire estate to a Quaker friend of his in 
Philadelphia — this was before the situation had 
become too critical; then a little group of friendly 
New Yorkers, among whom was Alexander Ham- 
ilton, bought it in; next it passed into the hands 
-*- 183 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

of one Friedrich Charles Hans Bruno, Baron 
Poelnitz, who appears to have been not much 
more than a figurehead. However, it was legally 
his property at the time of the adoption of the 
Constitution of the United States, and so it was 
not confiscated. It probably is safe to assume that 
Mr. Andrew Elliott still remained the power 
behind the throne, and benefited by the subse- 
quent sale of the land to Capt. Robert Richard 
Randall. 

Which brings us to a most picturesque page of 
New York history. 

I wonder what there is about privateering that 
attracts even the most law-abiding imagination. 
This ancient, more than half dishonourable, pro- 
fession has an unholy glamour about it and there 
are few respectable callings that so appeal to the 
colour-loving fancy. Not that privateering was 
quite the same as piracy, but it came so close a 
second that the honest rogues who plied the two 
trades must often have been in danger of getting 
their perquisites and obligations somewhat 
merged. It would have taken a very sharp 
judicial mind, or a singularly stout per- 
sonal conscience, to make the distinctions 
between them in sundry and fairly numerous 
cases. 

Wilson says: 

-*- 184 -+• 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

" In these troublous and not over-squeamish 
times, when commerce was other than the peace- 
ful pursuit it has since become, a promising ven- 
ture in privateering was often preferred to slower 
if safer sources of profit by the strong-stomached 
merchants and mariners of New York. . . . 
News that piracy under the guise of privateering 
was winked at by the New York authorities 
spread quickly among the captains serving under 
the black flag." 

Now there never was a lustier freebooter of the 
high seas than Capt. Thomas Randall, known 
familiarly as " Cap'n Tom," commander of the 
privateering ship Fox, and numerous other ves- 
sels. This boat, a brigantine, was well named, 
for she was quick and sly and yet could fight on 
occasion. Many a rich haul he made in her in 
1748, and many a hairbreadth escape shaved the 
impudent bow of her on those jolly, nefarious 
voyages of hers. One of her biggest captures 
was the French ship UAmazone. In 1757 
he took out the De Lancey, a brigatine, with 
fourteen guns, and made some more sensational 
captures. He is said to have plied a coastwise 
trade for the most part from New York to New 
Orleans, but, to quote Mr. Henry once more, 
" The Captain went wherever the Spanish flag 
-*- 185 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

covered the largest amount of gold." At all 
events he amassed a prodigious fortune even for 
a privateer. In 1758 he withdrew from active 
service himself, but still sent out privateering 
vessels. Some of them he lost. The De Lancey 
was captured, and so was the Saucy Sally — the 
latter by the British ship Experiment. The De 
Lancey however made some excellent hauls first. 
Peter Johnson, a seaman, made a will in 1757, 
leaving to a friend all debts, dues and " prize 
money which may become payable by the cruise 
of the De Lancey, Captain Randall command- 
ing." The luckless De Lancey was taken by the 
Dutch off Curacoa and the crew imprisoned. 
Perhaps poor Johnson was one of them. 

In spite of occasional ill-luck these were good 
days for the Captain, because the law, never over 
scrupulous, allowed him especial license, the coun- 
try being at war. Never was there a better era 
for adventurers, never a time when fortunes were 
to be sought under more favourable stars! 

A third quotation from Mr. Henry: 

" In those days a man was looked upon as being 
highly unfortunate if he had not a vessel which 
he could put to profitable use!" 

He was part owner of the Snow with sixteen 
guns, full owner of the Mary and also of the 
Lively. He had a bad time in connection with 

-*- 186 -+ 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

the latter. He sent her out with Thomas Quig- 
ley for captain. Quigley took the little schooner 
down the Jersey coast and stayed there. He 
never put out to sea at all. He rode comfortably 
at anchor near shore and when he ran out of 
rum put in and got more. After a while the 
mates and crew sent in a round robin to Captain 
Randall telling him the story. The Lively was 
swiftly called in and — what Captain Tom did to 
Quigley history does not state! 

The jolly piratical seaman did finely and flour- 
ished, green-bay like, in the sight of men. He 
was not without honours either. When Washing- 
ton was rowed from Elizabethtown Point to the 
first inauguration, his barge was manned by a 
crew of thirteen ships' captains, and he who had 
the signal distinction of being coxswain of that 
historic boat's company, was Cap'n Tom! 

Indeed there seems to be abundant proof that 
the Captain engineered the whole proceeding. It 
is certain that it was he who presented the " Presi- 
dential barge " to Washington for his use during 
his stay in New York, and he who selected that 
unusual crew, — practically every noted ship- 
master then in port. On the President's final 
departure for Mount Vernon, he again used the 
barge, putting out from the foot of Whitehall 
and when he reached Elizabethtown, he very 
-e- 187 -?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

courteously returned it as a gift to Captain 
Randall, and wrote him a letter of warm 
thanks. 

It is believed that Captain Thomas came from 
Scotland some time in the early part of the 
eighteenth century, but we know nothing of his 
antecedents and not much of his private life. He 
married in America, but we do not know the 
name of his wife. We do know that in 1775 his 
son, Robert Richard, was a youth of nineteen and 
a student at Columbia. This was the same year 
that the old Captain was serving on important 
committees and playing a conspicuous part in 
public affairs. Oh, yes! he was a most eminent 
citizen, and no one thought a whit the worse of 
him for what he called his " honest privateering." 
He was a member of the Legislature in 1784 
and voted in favour of bringing in tea free — 
when it was carried by American ships! 

And I picture Cap'n Tom as a stout and 
hearty rogue, with an open hand and heart and 
a certain cheery fashion of plying his shady call- 
ing, rather endearing than otherwise (I have no 
notion of his real looks nor qualities, but one's 
imagination must have its fling on occasion!). 
After all, there is not such a vast difference be- 
tween the manner of Sir Peter Warren's gains 
and Cap'n Tom Randall's. You may call a thing 
+- 188-1- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

by one name or by another, but, when it comes 
down to it, is the business of capturing enemy 
prize ships in order to grow rich on the proceeds 
so different from holding up merchantmen for the 
same reason? But we are concerned for the mo- 
ment with the Randalls, father and son, and most 
excellent fellows they appear to have both been. 
I should like to believe that Cap'n Tom owned 
a cutlass, but I fear it was a bit late for 
that! 

Captain Tom appears to have been generous 
and kindly, — like most persons of questionable 
and picturesque careers. The Silversmith who 
left his entire belongings to the Captain in 1796 
is but one of many who had reason to love him. 
One historian declares that he settled down, 
after retiring from the sea, and " became a re- 
spectable merchant at 10 Hanover Street," where 
he piled up more and more gold to leave his son 
Robert Richard. But it is a matter of record 
that the address at which he died was 8 White- 
hall. On Friday, October 27, 1797, he set forth 
on his last cruise, — after seventy-four adventurous 
years on earthly seas. 

He died much respected, — by no one more 

than his son, Robert Richard Randall, who had 

an immense admiration and reverence for his 

memory. It was he who, in 1790, bought the 

-*- 189 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Elliott estate from " Baron " Poelnitz, for the 
sum of five thousand pounds — a handsome prop- 
erty of some twenty-four acres covering the space 
between Fourth and Fifth avenues, Waverly 
Place and approximately Ninth Street. The 
Elliott house which has been described as being 
of " red brick with white " was clearly a rather 
pretentious affair, and stood, says Mrs. Lamb, 
so that Broadway when it was laid down " clipped 
the rear porch." 

It is a curious fact and worthy of note that 
the old, original house stood undamaged until 
1828, and that, being sold at auction and removed 
at that date, its materials were used in a house 
which a few years ago was still in good condition. 

Robert Richard Randall was also, like his 
father, known as " Captain," though there is no 
record of his ever having gone to sea as a sailor. 
Indeed he would scarcely have been made an 
" honourary " member of the Marine Society had 
he been a real shipmaster. Courtesy titles were 
de rigueur in those days, when a man was popu- 
lar, and he appears to have been thoroughly so. 

When it came time for him, too, to die, he 
paid his father's calling what tribute he could 
by the terms of his will. 

His lawyer — no less a person that Alexander 
Hamilton himself — called to discuss the terms of 
-*- 190 -*- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

this last document. By the bye, Hamilton's part 
in the affair is traditional and legendary rather 
than a matter of official record; — certainly his 
name does not appear in connection with the 
will. But Hamilton was the lawyer of Randall's 
sister, and a close family friend, so the story may 
more easily be true than false. 

This, then, is the way it goes : Alexander Ham- 
ilton was summoned to make out the last will 
and testament, or at least, to advise concerning it. 
Randall was already growing weak, but had a 
clear and determined notion of what he wanted 
to do with his money. This was on June i, 1801. 
The dying man left a number of small bequests 
to friends, families and servants, before he came 
to the real business on his mind. His bequests, 
besides money, included, " unto Betsey Hart, my 
housekeeper, my gold sleeve buttons," and unto 
Adam Shields, my faithful overseer, my gold 
watch," and " unto Gawn Irwin, who now lives 
with me, my shoe-buckles and knee-buckles." 
Adam Shields married Betsey Hart. They were 
both Scotch — probably from whatever part of 
Scotland the Randalls hailed in the first place. 

When these matters were disposed of, he began 

to speak of what was nearest his heart. He had 

a good deal of money; he wanted to leave it to 

some lasting use. Hamilton asked how he had 

-*- 191 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

made his money, and Randall explained he had 
inherited it from his father. 

" And how did he get it? " asked the great 
lawyer. 

" By honest privateering!" declared Captain 
Tom's son proudly. 

And then, or so the story goes, he went on to 
whisper: 

" My father's fortune all came from the sea. 
He was a seaman, and a good one. He had 
money, so he never suffered when he was worn 
out, but all are not like that. I want to make a 
place for the others. I want it to be a snug 
harbour for tired sailors." 

So the will, July 10, 1801, reads that Robert 
Richard Randall's property is left to found: " An 
Asylum or Marine Hospital, to be called ' The 
Sailors' Snug Harbour,' for the purpose of main- 
taining aged, decrepit, worn-out sailors." 

One of the witnesses, by the bye, was Henry 
Brevoort. 

The present bust of Randall which stands 
in the Asylum is, of course, quite apocryphal 
as to likeness. No one knows what he looked 
like, but out of such odds and ends of in- 
formation as the knee-buckles and so on, men- 
tioned in the will, the artistic imagination of St. 
Gaudens evolved a veritable beau of a mariner, 
-*- 192 -h 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

with knee-buckles positively resplendent and an 
Admiral's wig. And, though it may not be a 
good likeness, it is an agreeable enough ideal, and 
I think everyone approves of it. 

Robert Richard Randall is buried down there 
now and on his monument is a simple and rather 
impressive inscription commemorating this char- 
ity which — so it puts it — was " conceived in a 
spirit of enlarged Benevolence." 

Shortly afterwards he died, but his will, in 
spite of the inevitable wrangling and litigation 
of disgusted relations, lived on, and the Snug 
Harbour for Tired Sailors is an accomplished 
fact. Randall had meant it to be built on his 
property there — a good " seeded-to-grass " farm 
land, — and thought that the grain and vegetables 
for the sailor inmates of this Snug Harbour on 
land could be grown on the premises. But the 
trustees decided to build the institution on Staten 
Island. The New York Washington Square prop- 
erty, however, is still called the Sailors' Snug 
Harbour Estate, and through its tremendous in- 
crease in value the actual asylum was benefited 
incalculably. At the time of Captain Randall's 
death, the New York estate brought in about 
$4,000 a year. Today it is about $400,000, — and 
every cent goes to that real Snug Harbour for 
Tired Sailors out near the blue waters of Staten 
-*- 193 -+■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Island. So the " honest privateering " fortune 
has made at least one impossible seeming dream 
come true. 

As time went on this section — the Sailors' 
Snug Harbour Estate and the Brevoort property 
— was destined to become New York's most fash- 
ionable quarter. Its history is the history of 
American society, no less, and one can have no 
difficulty in visualising an era in which a certain 
naive ceremony combined in piquant fashion with 
the sturdy solidity of the young and vigorous 
country. In the correspondence of Henry Bre- 
voort and Washington Irving and others one gets 
delightful little pictures — vignettes, as it were — 
of social life of that day. Mr. Emmet writes 
begging for some snuff " no matter how old. It 
may be stale and flat but cannot be unprofitable! " 
Brevoort asks a friend to dine " On Thursday 
next at half-past four o'clock." He paints us a 
quaint sketch of " a little, round old gentleman, 
returning heel taps into decanters," at a soiree, 
adding: " His heart smote him at beholding the 
waste & riot of his dear adopted." We read of 
tea drinkings and coaches and his father's famous 
blunderbuss or " long gun " which he is present- 
ing to Irving. And there are other chroniclers 
of the times. Lossing, the historian, quotes an 
anonymous friend as follows: 
■+- 194-*- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

" We thought there was a goodly display of 
wealth and diamonds in those days, but, God bless 
my soul, when I hear of the millions amassed by 
the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Millses, Villards and 
others of that sort, I realise what a poor little 
doughnut of a place New York was at that early 
period! " 

He goes on to speak of dinner at three — a for- 
mal dinner party at four. The first private car- 
riage was almost mobbed on Broadway. Mrs. 
Jacob Little had " a very showy carriage lined 
with rose colour and a darky coachman in blue 
livery." 

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort's house stood on 
the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street — it 
is now occupied by the Charles de Rhams. And 
it chanced to be the scene of a certain very 
pretty little romance which can scarcely be 
passed over here. 

New York, as a matter of course, copied her 
fashionable standards from older lands. While 
Manhattan society was by no means a supine and 
merely imitative affair, the country was too new 
not to cling a bit to English and French for- 
malities. The great ladies of the day made 
something of a point of their " imported amuse- 
ments " as having a specific claim on fashionable 
-*- 195-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

favour. So it came about that the fascinating 
innovation of the masked ball struck the fancy 
of fashionable New York. There was some- 
thing very daring about the notion; it smacked 
of Latin skies and manners and suggested pos- 
sibilities of romance both licensed and not which 
charmed the ladies, even as it abashed them. 
There were those who found it a project scarcely 
in good taste; it is said indeed that there was 
no end of a flutter concerning it. But be that 
as it may, the masked ball was given, — the first 
that New York had ever known, and, it may be 
mentioned, the very last it was to know for many 
a long, discreet year! 

Haswell says that in this year there was a 
" fancy " ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Bre- 
voort and that the date was February 24th. It 
certainly was the same one, but he adds that it 
was generally pronounced " most successful." 
This one may doubt, since the results made 
masked balls so severely thought of that there 
was, a bit later, a fine of $1,000 imposed on 
anyone who should give one, — one-half to be 
deducted if you told on yourself! 

Nevertheless, George S. Hellman says that Mrs. 
Brevoort's ball, February 24, 1840, — was "the 
most splendid social affair of the first half of 
the nineteenth century in New York." 
-*- 196 -*- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

There was great preparation for it, and prac- 
tically all " society " was asked — and nothing 
and nobody else. It was incidentally the occa- 
sion of the first " society reporting." Attree, of 
the New York Herald, was an invited guest and 
went in costume — quite an innovation for con- 
servative old Manhattan. 

Lossing tells us: " At the close of this decade 
the features of New York society presented con- 
spicuous transformations. Many exotic customs 
prevailed, both public and private, and the ex- 
pensive pleasures of the Eastern Hemisphere had 
been transplanted and taken firm root. Among 
other imported amusements was the masked ball, 
the first of which occurred in the city of New 
York in 1840, and produced a profound sensa- 
tion, not only per se, but because of an attending 
circumstance which stirred ' society ' to its foun- 
dation." 

The British Consul in New York at that 
time was Anthony Barclay, — he lived at Col- 
lege Place, — who was destined later to fall into 
evil repute, by raising recruits here during the 
Crimean trouble. He had a daughter, Matilda, 
who was remarkably lovely and — if we may 
believe reports — a very great belle in Ameri- 
can society. She had a number of " suitors," as 
they were gracefully called in those days, and 

-h- I97 -i- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

among them was one Burgwyne, from South 
Carolina — very young, and, we may take it, 
rather poor. 

Lossing says: "There was also in attendance a 
gay, young South Carolinian named Burgwyne." 

The Consul and Mrs. Barclay disapproved of 
him strongly. But Matilda who was beautiful, 
warm-blooded and wayward did not. She loved 
Burgwyne with a reciprocal ardour, and when 
the masked ball at the Brevoorts' came on the 
tapis it seemed as though the Goddess of Romance 
had absolutely stretched out her hands to these 
two reckless, but adorable lovers. 

They had a favourite poem — most lovers 
have favourite poems; — theirs was " Lalla 
Rookh." 

There may be diverse opinions as to Thomas 
Moore's greatness, but there can scarcely be two 
as to his lyric gift. He could write charming 
love-songs, simple and yet full of colour, and, 
given the Oriental theme, it is no wonder that 
youths and maidens of his day sighed and smiled 
over " Lalla Rookh " as over nothing that had 
yet been written for them. It is a delightful tale, 
half-prose and half-poetry, written entirely and 
whole-heartedly for lovers, and Burgwyne and 
Matilda found it easy to put themselves in the 
places of the romantic characters in the drama — 
-f- 198 -*- 




GROVE STREET 

Looking toward St. Luke's Church 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

Lalla Rookh, the incomparably beautiful East- 
ern Princess and Feramorz, the young Prince 
in disguise, " graceful as that idol of women, 
Crishna." 

They secretly agreed to go to the masked ball 
at the Brevoorts' as their romantic favourites and 
prototypes. The detailed descriptions in the book 
gave them sufficient inspiration. She wore float- 
ing gauzes, bracelets, " a small coronet of jewels " 
and " a rose-coloured, bridal veil." His dress 
was " simple, yet not without marks of costliness," 
with a " high Tartarian cap. . . . Here and 
there, too, over his vest, which was confined by a 
flowered girdle of Kaskan, hung strings of fine 
pearls, disposed with an air of studied negli- 
gence." 

So they met at the ball and danced together, and 
I suppose he quoted: 

"Fly to the desert, fly with me, 
Our Arab tents are rude for thee; 
But, oh! the choice what heart can doubt, 
Of tents with love, or thrones without? '' 

Obviously she chose the tents with love, for 
as the clock struck four they slipped away to- 
gether and were married! 

As Lossing puts it: 

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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

" They left the festive scene together at four 
o'clock in the morning, and were married before 
breakfast." 

They did not change their costumes, dear 
things! They wanted the romantic trappings for 
their love poem — a love poem which was to 
them more enchanting — more miraculous — than 
that of Lalla Rookh and the King of Bucharia. 
I hope they lived happily ever after, like the 
brave, young romanticists they were! 

In 1835 a hotel was opened on the corner of 
Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, and it was ap- 
propriately named for the illustrious family over 
the way. The Brevoort House is certainly as 
historic a pile, socially speaking, as lower New 
York has to offer. Arthur Bartlett Maurice says 
of it: 

" In the old-time novels of New York life visit- 
ing Englishmen invariably stopped at the Bre- 
voort." 

Of this hotel more anon, since it has recently 
become knit into the fabric of the modern 
Village. 

But a scant two blocks away from the Brevoort 
stands another hostelry which is indissolublv a 
part of Xew York's growth — especially the 
growth of her Artist's Colony. It is the Lafayette, 

■+- 200 -*- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

or as many of its habitues still love to call it — ■ 
" The Old Martin.'' This, the first and most 
famous French restaurant of New York, needs a 
special word or two. It must be considered alone, 
and not in the company of lesser and more mod- 
ern eating places. 

John Reed says that the " Old Martin " was the 
real link between the old Village and the new, 
since it was the cradle of artistic life in New 
York. Bohemians, he declared, first fore- 
gathered there as Bohemians, and the beginnings 
of what has become America's Latin Quarter and 
Soho there first saw the light of day — or rather 
the lights of midnight. 

Jean Baptiste Martin who had been running a 
hotel in Panama during the first excavations 
there — made by the French, as you may or may 
not remember — came to New York in 1883. He 
had been here the year before for a time and 
had decided the city needed a French hotel. 
He arrived on the 25th of June, and on the 
26th he bought the hotel! He chose a house on 
University Place — No. 17 — a little pension kept 
by one Eugene Larru, and from time to time 
bought the adjoining houses and built extensions 
until he had made it the building we see today. 
He called it the Hotel de Panama. 

But it was not as the Hotel de Panama that 
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GREENWICH VILLAGE 

it won its unique place in the hearts of New 
Yorkers. " In 1886," Mr. Martin says, "I de- 
cided to change the name of my place. ' Panama ' 
gave people a bad impression. They associated 
it with fever and Spaniards, and neither were 
popular! So it became the Hotel Martin. Then, 
when I started another restaurant at Twenty- 
sixth Street, the l Old Martin ' became the 
Lafayette." 

The artists and writers came to the Hotel 
Martin to invite their respective Muses inspired 
by Mr. Martin's excellent food and drink. From 
the bachelors' quarters on the nearby square — the 
Benedick and other studio houses — shabby, am- 
bitious young men came in droves. Mr. Martin 
remembers " Bob " Chambers, and some young 
newspaper men from the World — Goddard, Man- 
son and others. From uptown the great for- 
eigners came down — some of them stayed there, 
indeed. In 1889, approximately, it started its 
biggest boom, and it went on steadily. Ask 
either Mr. Martin or its present proprietor, Mr. 
Raymond Orteig, and he will tell you, and 
truthfully, that it has never flagged, that 
" boom." The place is as popular as ever, 
because, in a changing world, a changing era 
and a signally changing town, it — does not 
change. 

-i- 202 -f- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

It was to the Hotel Martin that the famous sing- 
ers came — Jean and Edouard de Reszke and Pol 
Plangon and Melba; the French statesman, Jules 
Cambon, used to come, and Maurice Grau — then 
the manager of the Metropolitan — and Chartran, 
the celebrated painter, and the great Ysaye and 
Bartholdi. And Paulus — Koster and Bial's first 
French importation — to say nothing of Anna 
Held and Sandow! 

A motley company enough, to be sure, and 
certainly one worthy to form the nucleus of 
New York's Bohemia. 

Says Mr. Martin: "The most interesting thing 
that ever happened in the * Old Martin'? I 
can tell you that quite easily. It was the blizzard 
of 1888, when we were snowed in. The horse 
cars ran on University Place then, the line 
terminating at Barclay Street. I have a picture 
of one car almost snowed under, for the snow 
was fully six feet deep. It was a Saturday night 
and very crowded. When it became time for 
the people to go home they could not go. So 
they had to stay, and they stayed three days. 
They slept on billiard tables, on the floor or 
where they could. We did our best, but it was 
a big crowd. Interesting? It was most interest- 
ing indeed to me, for I could get no milk. I 
could supply them with all the wine they wanted, 
-*- 203 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

but no milk! And they demanded milk for their 
coffee. Oh, that blizzard!" 

Mr. Martin, in remembering interesting epi- 
sodes, forgot that trifling incident — the Spanish- 
American War, in 1898. Whether because of 
his early connections with Panama (there were 
countless Spaniards and Mexicans who patronised 
the hotel at that time) or whether because of a 
national and political misunderstanding, he was 
justifiably and seriously concerned as to the feel- 
ing of New York for the Hotel Martin. Many 
good and wise persons expected France to side 
with Spain, and many others watched curiously to 
see what Frenchmen in New York would do. 

Mr. Martin left them but a short time for 
speculation. Today, with our streets aflutter with 
Allied colours, perhaps we fail to appreciate an 
individual demonstration such as this — but at 
that time there were few banners flying, and Mr. 
Martin led the patriotic movement with an 
American flag in every one of the fifty windows 
of the Hotel Martin and a French flag to top off 
the whole display! Perhaps it was the first 
suggestion, in street decoration, of what has re- 
cently proved to be so strong a bond between 
this nation and France. 

If any of you who read have even begun to 
peer into Bohemian New York you have un- 

-e- 204 -i- 



PAGES OF ROMANCE 

doubtedly visited the Lafayette as it is today. 
And, if you have, you have undoubtedly seen or 
perhaps even played the " Lafayette Game." It 
is a weird little game that is played for drinks, 
and requires quite a bit of skill. It is well known 
to all frequenters; the only odd thing is that it is 
not better known. 

"Americans are funny!" laughs Raymond 
Orteig. " When I go abroad and see something 
which is new and different from what has been 
before, my instinct is to get hold of it and bring 
it back. If I can I bring it back in actual bulk; 
if I were a writer I would bring it back in 
another way. But through these years, while 
everyone has played our absurd little game, no 
one has ever suggested writing about it — until 
tonight!" 

Its name? It is Culbuto. That is French, — 
practically applied, — for failure! It is, you see, 
an effort to keep the little balls from falling 
into the wrong holes. As it so often results in 
failure Culbuto is an ideal game to play for 
drinks! Someone has to pay all the time! It 
is an unequal contest between the individual and 
the law of gravity! 

But we must not linger too long at the Lafay- 
ette, alluring though it may be. All Greenwich 
is beckoning to us, a few blocks away. We have 
-*- 205 -h 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

a new world to explore — the world below Four- 
teenth Street. 

Fourteenth Street is the boundary line which 
marks the Greenwich Village's utmost city limits, 
as it marked those of our great-grandfathers. 
Like a wall it stands across the town separating 
the new from the old uncompromisingly. Miss 
Euphemia Olcott, who has been quoted here be- 
fore, describes the evolution of Fourteenth Street 
in the following interesting way: 

" Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth 
Avenues I have seen with three sets of buildings 
— first shanties near Sixth Avenue from the rear 
of which it was rumoured a bogy would be likely 
to pursue and kidnap us. . . . These shanties 
were followed by fine, brownstone residences. 
. . . Some of these, however, I think came 
when there had ceased to be a village. Later on 
came business into Fourteenth Street. ..." 

And today those never-to-be-sufficiently-pitied 
folk who live in the Fifties and Sixties and Seven- 
ties think of Fourteenth Street as downtown! 



206 



Restaurants, and the Magic Door 



CHAPTER VII 

Restaurants, and the Magic Door 



What scenes in fiction cling more persistently in the memory 
than those that deal with the satisfying of man's appetite? Who 
ever heard of a dyspeptic hero? Are not your favourites be- 
yond the Magic Door all good trenchermen ? 

— Arthur Bartlett Maurice. 

T was O. Henry, I believe, who spoke 
of restaurants as " literary landmarks." 
They are really much more than that — 
they are signposts, psychical rather than 
physical, which show the trend of the times — or 
of the neighbourhood. I suppose nothing in 
Greenwich Village could be more significantly 
illuminating than its eating places. There are, 
of course, many sorts. The Village is neither so 
unique nor so uniform as to have only one sort 
of popular board. But in all the typical Green- 
wich restaurants you will find the same elusive 
something, the spirit of the picturesque, the un- 
trammelled, the quaint and charming — in short, 
the different! 

■*- 209 -+• 




GREENWICH VILLAGE 

The Village is not only a locality, you under- 
stand, it is a point of view. It reaches out im- 
periously and fastens on what it will. The Bre- 
voort basement — after ten o'clock at night — is 
the Village. So is the Lafayette on occasion. 
During the day they are delightful French hos- 
telries catering to all the world who like 
heavenly things to eat and the right atmosphere 
in which to eat them. But as the magic hour 
strikes, presto! — they suffer a sea change and 
become the quintessence of the Spirit of the 
Village! 

It is 10.20 P.M. at the Brevoort in the restaurant 
upstairs. All the world and his wife — or his 
sweetheart — are fully represented. Most of the 
uptowners — the regulation clientele — are going 
away, having finished gorging themselves on 
delectable things; some few of them are linger- 
ing, lazily curious; a certain small number 
are still coming in, moved by that restless 
Manhattanic spirit that hates to go home in the 
dark. 

Among these is a discontented, well-dressed 
couple, seen half an hour before completing their 
dinner a block away at the Lafayette. The head 
waiter at that restaurant explained them non- 
chalantly, not to say casually: 

" It is the gentleman who married his mani- 

-*- 210 -i- 



^y 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

curist. Regard, then — one perceives they are not 
happy — eh? It is understood that she beats 
him." 

Yonder is a moving-picture star, quite alone, 
eating a great deal, and looking blissfully con- 
tent. There is a man who has won a fortune 
in war-brides — the one at the next table did it 
with carpets. There is a great lady — a very great 
lady indeed — who, at this season, should be out 
of town. 

Swiftly moving, deft-handed waiters, the faint 
perfume of delicate food, the sparkle of light 
upon rare wine, the complex murmur of a well- 
filled dining-room. It is so far not strikingly 
different, in the impression it gives, from uptown 
restaurants. 

c- But the hands of the clock are pointing to the 
half-hour after ten. 

Hasten, then, to the downstairs cafe, — the two 
rooms, sunk below the level of Fifth Avenue, yet 
cool and airy. If you hurry you will be just in 
time to see the Village come in. For this is their 
really favourite haunt — their Mecca when their 
pockets will stand it — the Village Restaurant 
de Luxe! 

Upstairs are exquisite frocks and impeccable 
evening clothes; good jewels and, incidentally, 
a good many tired faces — from uptown. Down 

•4- 211 -*■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

here it is different. The crowd is younger, poorer, 
more strikingly bizarre — immeasurably more in- 
teresting. Everyone here does something, or 
thinks he does — which is just as good; — or pre- 
tends to — which is next best. There is a startling 
number of girls. Girls in smocks of " artistic " 
shades — bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending 
violet; girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, 
is usually either arranged in a wildly natural 
bird's-nest mass, or boldly clubbed after the 
fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; 
girls with tense little faces, slender arms and an 
astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And men 
who, for the most part, are too busy with their 
ideals to cut their hair; men whose collars may 
be low and rolling, or high and bound with black 
silk stocks after the style of another day; men 
who are, variously, affectedly natural or nat- 
urally affected, but who are nearly all of them 
picturesque, and, in spite of their poses, quite in 
earnest, after their queer fashion. They are all 
prophets and seers down here; they wear their 
bizarre hair-cuts and unusual clothes with a cer- 
tain innocently flaunting air which rather disarms 
you. Their poses are not merely poses; they are 
their almost childlike way of showing the prosaic 
outer world how different they are! 

Here they all flock — whenever they have the 

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RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

price. That may be a bit beyond them sometimes, 
but usually there is someone in the crowd who 
is " flush," and that means who will pay. For 
the Villagers are not parsimonious; they stand 
in no danger of ever making themselves rich and 
thus acquiring place in the accursed class called 
the Philistines! 

It is beyond question that the French have a 
genius for hospitality. It must be rooted in their 
beautiful, national tact, that gracious impulse 
combining chivalry to women, friendliness to 
men and courtesy to all which is so characteristic 
of " the world's sweetheart " France. I have 
never seen a French restaurant where the most 
casual visitor was not made personally and charm- 
ingly welcome, and I have never seen such typi- 
cally French restaurants as the Lafayette and the 
Brevoort. And the Villagers feel it too. From 
the shabbiest socialist to the most flagrantly 
painted little artist's model, they drift in thank- 
fully to that atmosphere of gaiety and sympathy 
and thoughtful kindliness which is, after all, just — 
the air of France. 

Next let us take a restaurant of quite another 
type, not far from the Brevoort — all the Village 
eating places are close together — walk across the 
square, a block further, and you are there. 

It is not many years since Bohemia ate chiefly 

■+-2I3-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

in the side streets, at restaurants such as Enrico's, 
Baroni's — there are a dozen such places. They 
still exist, but the Village is dropping away from 
them. They are very good and very cheap, and 
the tourist — that is, the uptowner — thinks he is 
seeing Bohemia when he eats in them, but not 
many of them remain at all characteristic. Ber- 
tolotti's is something of an exception. It is a 
restaurant of the old style, a survival of the 
days when all Bohemian restaurants were Italian. 
La Signora says they have been there, just there 
on Third Street, for twenty years. If you are a 
newcomer you will probably eat in the upstairs 
room, in cool and rather remote grandeur, and 
the pretty daughter with the wondrous black eyes 
will serve you the more elaborate of the most 
extraordinarily named dishes on the menu. But 
if, by long experience, you know what is pleasant 
and comfortable you will take a place in the 
basement cafe. At the clean, bare table, in the 
shadow of the big, bright, many-bottled bar, you 
will eat your Risotia alia Milanese, your coteletti 
di Vitelle, your asparagi — it's probably the only 
place in the city where they serve asparagus 
with grated cheese — finally your zambaione, — a 
heavenly sort of hot " flip," very foamy and se- 
ductive and strongly flavoured with Marsarla 
wine. 

H— 214 — ?- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

If you stand well with the house you may have 
the honour to be escorted by the Signora herself 
— handsome, dignified, genial, with a veritable 
coronal of splendid grey hair — to watch the 
eternal bowling in the alley back of the restau- 
rant. I have watched them fascinated for long 
periods and I have never learned what it is they 
are trying to do with those big " bowling balls." 
They have no ninepins, so they are not trying to 
make a ten-strike. Apparently, it is a game 
however, for now and then a shout of triumph 
proclaims that someone has won. He orders the 
drinks and they go at it again. 

" But, what is it? " I asked the Signora. 

" Eh — oh — just a Giocho di Bocca" she re- 
turned vaguely, " a game of bowls — how should 
I know? " 

Beyond the bowling alley is a long, narrow 
yard with bushes. It would make quite a charm- 
ing summer garden with little tables for after- 
dinner coffee. But the Signora says that the 
Chiesa, there at the back of it, objects. The 
Chiesa, I think, is the Judson Memorial Church 
on Washington Square. Just why they don't 
want the Signora to have tables in her own back 
yard is not clear. She, being a Latin, shrugs 
her shoulders and makes no comment. Standing 
in the darkness, there is a real freshness in the 
-*- 215 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

air; there is also a delicious, gurgling sound, the 
music of summer streams. 

"How lovely!" you whisper. " What a de- 
lightful, rippling sound." 

" Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel," says 
La Signora sweetly. 

There is, at Bertolotti's one of the queerest 
little old figures in all that part of the world, 
the bent and aged Italian known universally as 
Castagna (Chestnuts), because of the interminable 
anecdotes he tells over and over again. No one 
knows his real name, not even the Signor or 
the Signora. Yet he has worked for them for 
years. He wants no wages — only a living and 
a home. In the aforementioned back yard he has 
built himself a little house about the size of a 
dog kennel. It is a real house, and like nothing 
so much as the historic residence of the Three 
Bears. It has a window, eaves, weather-strips and 
a clothesline, for he does his own washing. He 
trots off there very happily when his light work 
is done, and, when his door is closed, opens it for 
no one. That scrap of a building is Castagna s 
castle. One evening I went to call on him, but 
he had put out his light. In the gleam that 
came from the bowling alley behind me, some- 
thing showed softly red and green and white 
against the wooden door. I put out my hand and 
-*- 216 -*- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

touched that world-famous cross. It was about 
six inches long, and only of paper, but it was the 
flag of Italy, and it kept watch outside the Casa 
Castagna. I am certain that he would not sleep 
well without it. 

Probably the most famous Bohemian restaurant 
in the quarter is the Black Cat. It is not really 
more typical than the others, — indeed it is rather 
less so, — but it is extremely striking, and most 
conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hyper- 
critical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black 
Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too 
obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of 
Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too 
much conventionalised. Just the same, it is fas- 
cinating. From the moment you pass the outer, 
polite portals and intermediate anterooms and 
enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room at the 
back, you are enormously interested, excellently 
entertained. The noise is the thing that im- 
presses you first. In most Village resorts you 
find quiet the order of the day — or rather night. 
Even " Polly's," crowded as it is, is not noisy. In 
the Brevoort there is a steady, low rumble of 
talk, but not actual noise. At the Black Cat it 
is one continual and all-pervading roar — a joy- 
ous roar, too; these people are having a simply 
gorgeous time and don't care who knows it. It 
•+- 217 -+■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

is a wonder that the high-set rafters do not fall — 
that the lofty, white-washed walls of brick do 
not tremble, and that the little black cats set in a 
rigid conventional design around the whole room 
do not come to life in horror, and fly spitting up 
the short stairway and out of the door! 

When you go to the Black Cat you would bet- 
ter check what prejudices you have as to what is 
formal and fitting, and leave them with your coat 
at the entrance. Not that it is disreputable — 
Luigi would pale with the shock of such a 
thought! It is just — Bohemian! Everyone does 
exactly what he wishes to do. Sometimes, one 
person's wishes conflict with someone else's, and 
then there is a fight, and the police are called, 
and the rest of the patrons have a beautiful time 
watching a perfectly good and unexpected free 
show! As a rule, however, this determination 
on the part of each one to do what he wants to 
has no violent results. An incident will show 
something of the entire liberty allowed in the 
Black Cat. A man came in with two girls, and, 
seeing a jolly stag party at another table, decided 
to join them. He promptly did so, with, as far 
as could be seen, no word of excuse to his femi- 
nine companions. In a moment two young men 
strolled up to their table and sat down. 

" Your friend asked us to come over here and 
-j- 218 -+■ 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

take his place," explained one nonchalantly. 
" You don't object, ladies? " 

The girls received them amiably. Apparently 
no one thought of such a formality as names or 
introductions. The original host stayed away 
for the rest of the evening, but the four new 
acquaintances seemed to get along quite satisfac- 
torily without him. 

A young married woman from uptown came 
in with her husband and two other men. A good- 
looking lad, much flushed and a little unsteady, 
stopped by her chair. 

" Say, k-kid," he exclaimed, with a disarming 
chuckle, " you're the prettiest girl here — and you 
come here with three p-protectors! Say, it's a 
shame! " 

He lurched cheerfully upon his way and even 
the slightly conservative husband found a grudg- 
ing smile wrung out of him. 

There is a pianist at the Black Cat — a real 
pianist, not just a person who plays the piano. 
She is a striking figure in a quaint, tunic-like 
dress, greying hair and a keen face, and a per- 
sonal friend of half the frequenters. She has an 
uncanny instinct for the psychology of the mo- 
ment. She knows just when " Columbia " will 
be the proper thing to play, and when the crowd 
demands the newest rag-time. She will feel an 
•+- 219 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

atmospheric change as unswervingly as any 
barometer, and switch in a moment from " Good- 
bye Girls, Good-bye " to the love duet from 
Faust. She can play Chopin just as well as she 
can play Sousa, and she will tactfully strike up 
" It's Always Fair Weather " when she sees a 
crowd of young fellows sit down at a table; 
" There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To- 
night " to welcome a lad in khaki; and the very 
latest fox trot for the party of girls and young 
men from uptown, who look as though they were 
dying to dance. She plays the " Marseillaise " 
for Frenchmen, and " Dixie " for visiting South- 
erners, and " Mississippi " for the frequenters of 
Manhattan vaudeville shows. And, then, at the 
right moment, her skilled fingers will drift sud- 
denly into something different, some exquisite, 
inspired melody — the soul-child of some high 
immortal — and under the spell the noisy crowd 
grows still for a moment. For even at the Black 
Cat they have not forgotten how to dream. 

Probably the Black Cat inspired many other 
Village restaurants — the Purple Pup for in- 
stance. 

The Purple Pup is a queer little place. It is 
in a most exclusive and aristocratic part of the 
Square — in the basement of one of the really 
handsome houses, in fact. It is, so far as is 

-*- 220 -J- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

visible to the naked eye, quite well conducted, 
yet there is something mysterious about it. 
Doubtless this is deliberately stage-managed and 
capitalised, but it is effectively done. It is an 
unexpected sort of place. One evening you go 
there and find it in full blast; the piano tinkling, 
many cramped couples dancing in the two tiny 
rooms, and every table covered with tea cups 
or lemonade glasses. Another night you may 
arrive at exactly the same time and there will 
be only candlelight and a few groups, talking in 
low tones. 

Here, as in all parts of the Village, the man in 
the rolling collar, and the girl in the smock, will 
be markedly in evidence. Yes; they really do 
look like that. Lots of the girls have their hair 
cut short too. 

And "Polly's"! 

In many minds, " Polly's " and the Village 
mean one and the same thing. Certainly no one 
could intelligently write about the one without 
due and logical tribute to the other. Polly 
Holliday's restaurant (The Greenwich Village 
Inn is its formal name in the telephone book) is 
not incidental, but institutional. It is fixed, rep- 
resentative and sacred, like Police Headquarters, 
Trinity Church and the Stock Exchange. It is 
indispensable and independent. The Village 

-t- 221 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

could not get along without it, but the Village 
no longer talks about it nor advertises it. It is, 
in fact, so obviously a vital part of Greenwich 
that often enough a Greenwicher, asked to point 
out hostelries of peculiar interest, will forget to 
mention it. 

"How about 'Polly's'?" you remind him. 

" Oh — but ' Polly's '! " he protests wonderingly. 
" Why, it wouldn't be the Village at all without 
1 Polly's.' It — why, of course, I never thought 
anyone had to be told about ' Polly's 7 " 

His attitude will be as disconcerted as though 
you asked him whether he was in the habit of 
using air to breathe, — or was accustomed to going 
to bed to sleep. 

Polly Holliday used to have her restaurant 
under the Liberal Club — where the Dutch Oven 
is now, — but now she has her own good-sized 
place on Fourth Street, and it remains, through 
fluctuations and fads, the most thoroughly and 
consistently popular Village eating place extant. 
It is, outwardly, not original nor superlatively 
striking in any way. It is a clean, bare place 
with paper napkins and such waits between 
courses as are unquestionably conducive to the 
encouragement of philosophic, idealistic, anar- 
chistic and aesthetic debates. But the food is 
excellent, when you get it, and the atmosphere 

-J- 222 -H- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

both friendly and — let us admit frankly — in- 
spiring. The people are interesting; they discuss 
interesting things. You are comfortable, and 
you are exhilarated. You see, quickly enough, 
why the Village could not possibly get along 
without its inn; why "Polly's" is so essential 
a part of its life that half the time it overlooks 
it. Outsiders always know about " Polly's." But 
the Villager? 

" ' Polly's '? But of course ' Polly's.' " 

There it is. Of course " Polly's." " Polly's " 
is Greenwich Village in little; it is, in a fashion, 
cosmic and symbolic. 

Under the Liberal Club, where " Polly's " used 
to be located, the " Dutch Oven," with its ca- 
pacious fireplace and wholesome meals, now holds 
sway. The prices are reasonable, the food sub- 
stantial and the atmosphere comfortable, so it is 
a real haven of good cheer to improvident Vil- 
lagers. 

The Village Kitchen on Greenwich Avenue is 
another place of the same sort. And Gallup's — 
almost the first of these " breakfast and lunch " 
shops — is another. They are not unlike a Childs 
restaurant, but with the rarefied Village air added. 
You eat real food in clean surroundings, as you 
do in Childs', but you do it to an accompani- 
ment that is better than music — a sort of life- 
-*- 223 -i- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

song, rather stirring and quite touching in its 
way — the Song of the Village. How can people 
be both reckless and deeply earnest? But the 
Villagers are both. 

One of the oddest sights on earth is a typical 
" Breakfast" at " Polly's," the " Kitchen " or the 
" Dutch Oven," after one of the masked balls 
for which the Village has recently acquired such 
a passion. After you have been up all night in 
some of these mad masquerades — of which more 
anon — you may not, by Village convention, go 
home to bed. You must go to breakfast with the 
rest of the Villagers. And you must be prepared 
to face the cold, grey dawn of " the morning 
after " while still in your war paint and draggled 
finery. It is an awful ordeal. But " it's being 
done in the Village"! 

Quite recently a new sort of eating place has 
sprung up in Greenwich Village — of so original 
and novel a character that we must investigate 
it in at least a few of its manifestations. Speak- 
ing for myself, I had never believed that such 
places could exist within sound of the " L " and 
a stone's throw from drug stores and offices. 

But see what you think of them. 



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RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 



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" I can't believe that ! " said Alice. 

" Can't you ? " the Queen said in a pitying tone. " Try 
again : draw a long breath and shut your eyes." 

Alice laughed. " There's no use trying," she said. " One 
can't believe impossible things." 

" I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. 
" When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. 
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things 
before breakfast." — " Through the Looking Glass." 

" But it can't be this! " I said. " You've made 
a mistake in the number!" 

" It is this," declared my guide and companion. 
" This is where Nanni Bailey has her tea shop." 

" But this is — is — isn't anything! " 

Indeed the number to which my friend pointed 
seemed to indicate the entrance to a sort of ware- 
house, if it indicated anything at all. On peering 
through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared 
instead to be a particularly desolate-looking cel- 
lar. There were old barrels and boxes about, an 
expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy 
distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading up- 
wards to a faint light. 

" It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come 
true! " I exclaimed. " It looks as though it might 
-j- 225 -+■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

be a burglars' den or somebody's back yard, but 
anyway, it isn't a restaurant! " 

"It is too!". (Came back at me triumphantly. 
" Look at that sign!" 

By the faint rays of a street light on nearby 
Sixth Avenue, I saw the shabby little wooden 
sign, " The Samovar." This extraordinary place 
was a restaurant after all! 

We entered warily, having a vague expectation 
of pickpockets or rats, and climbed that ladder 
— I mean staircase — to what was purely and 
simply a loft. 

But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious, 
simple, picturesque apotheosis of a loft! A loft 
with the rough bricks whitewashed and the heavy 
rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables 
and a bare floor and an only slightly partitioned- 
off kitchenette where the hungry could descry 
piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups. And 
there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar 
itself, a really splendid affair, and one actually 
not for decorative purposes only, but for use. I 
had always thought samovars were for the orna- 
mentation either of houses or foreign-atmosphere 
novels. But you could use this thing. I saw 
people go and get glasses-full of tea out of it. 

Under the smoke-dimmed lights were curious, 
eager, interesting faces: a pale little person with 

-*- 226 -T- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

red hair I recognised instantly as an actress whom 
I had just seen at the Provincetown Players — a 
Village Theatrical Company — in a tense and ter- 
ribly tragic role. Beyond her was a white-haired 
man with keen eyes — a distinguished writer and 
socialist. A shabby poet announced to the sym- 
pathetic that he had sold something after two 
years of work. Immediately they set about mak- 
ing a real fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss 
Bailey, a small, round, efficient person with nice 
eyes and good manners, moved about among her 
guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The 
best cheese sandwiches in New York went round. 
A girl in a vampire costume of grey — hooded and 
with long trailing sleeves — got up from her soli- 
tary place in the corner. She seemed to be wear- 
ing, beneath the theatrical garment, a kimono 
and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply 
drifted in for sandwiches before going to bed. 
She vanished down the ladder. 

An hour later, we, too, climbed down the lad- 
derish stairs, my companion and I, and as we 
came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth Street at 
midnight, I had a really odd sensation. I felt 
as though I had been reading a fascinating and 
unusual book, and had — suddenly closed it for 
the night. 

This was one of the first of the real Village 
•*- 227 —j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

eating places which I ever knew. Perhaps that 
is why it comes first to my memory as I write. 
I do not know that it is more representative or 
more interesting than others. But it was worth 
going back to. 

Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor 
yet the unusual surroundings, that bring you back 
to these places. It's the — well, one has to use, 
once in a while, the hard-worked and generally 
inappropriate word " atmosphere." Like " tem- 
perament " and " individuality " and the rest of 
the writer-folk's old reliables, " atmosphere " is 
too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of express- 
ing something you won't take the trouble to de- 
fine more expressively. Dick says in " The Light 
That Failed " that an old device for an unskilful 
artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers 
somewhere in a picture where it will cover up 
bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt to use 
stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion. 

But this is a fact just the same. Nearly all the 
Greenwich Village places really have atmosphere. 
You can be cynical about it, or frown at it, or 
do anything you like about it, but it's there, and 
it's the real thing. It's an absolute essence and 
ether which you feel intensely and breathe neces- 
sarily, but which no one can put quite definitely 
into the concrete form of words. I have heard of 
■*- 228 -+ 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

liquid or solidified air, but that's a scientific ex- 
periment, and who wants to try scientific experi- 
ments on the Village which we all love? 

" But such an amount of play-acting and pose! " 
I hear someone complain, referring to the Vil- 
lage with contemptuous irritation. " They pre- 
tend to be seeking after truth and liberty of 
thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are 
steeped in artificiality." 

Yes, to a certain extent that is true — true of a 
portion of the Village, at any rate, and a certain 
percentage of the Villagers. But even if it is 
true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of 
understanding to make us tender and tolerant 
instead of scornful and hard. My dear lady, you 
who complained of the " play-acting," and you 
other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies 
and pretenses in Our Village only a spectacle of 
cheap affectation and artifice, have you lived so 
long and yet do not know that the play-acting 
instinct is one of the most universal of all in- 
stincts — the very first developed, and the very 
last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies? 
From the moment when we try to play ball 
with sunbeams through those intermediate years 
wherein we imagine ourselves everything on 
earth that we are not, down to those last days of 
all, when we live, all furtive and unsuspected, a 
-j- 229 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

secret life of the spirit — either a life of remem- 
brance or a life of imagination visualising what 
we have wanted and have missed, — what do we 
do but pretend, — make believe, — pose, if you will? 
When we are little we pretend to be knights and 
ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and 
Red Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and 
explorers. We people the window boxes with 
elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red 
Indians and bears. The commonplace world 
about us is not truly commonplace, since our fancy, 
still fresh from eternity, can transform three dusty 
shrubs into an enchanted forest, and an automo- 
bile into the most deliciously formidable of the 
Dragon Family. A bit later, our pretending is 
done more cautiously. We do not confess our 
shy flights of imagination: we take a prosaic out- 
ward pose, and try not to advertise the fact that 
our geese wear (to our eyes) swans' plumage, 
and that our individual roles are (to our own 
view) always those of heroes and heroines. No 
one of us but mentally sees himself or herself 
doing something which is as impracticable as 
cloud-riding. No one of us but dreams of the 
impossible and in a shamefaced, almost clandes- 
tine, fashion pictures it and lingers over it. All 
make-believe, you see, only we hate to admit it! 
The different thing about Greenwich is that there 
-e- 230 -h 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

they do admit it, quite a number of them. They 
accept the pretending, play-acting spirit as a per- 
fectly natural — no, as an inevitable — part of life, 
and, with a certain whimsical seriousness, not un- 
like that of real children, they provide for it. You 
know children can make believe, know that it is 
make believe, yet enjoy it all the more for that. 
So can the Villagers. Hence, places like — let us 
say, as an example — " The Pirate's Den." 

It is a very real pirate's den, lighted only by 
candles. A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a 
regulation " Jolly Roger," a black flag ornamented 
with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but 
even a healthy-minded child will play at grue- 
some and ghoulish games once in a while. 

There is a Dead Man's Chest too, — and if you 
open it you will find a ladder leading down into 
mysterious depths unknown. If you are very 
adventurous you will climb down and bump your 
head against the cellar ceiling and inspect what 
is going to be a subterranean grotto as soon as it 
can be fitted up. You climb up again and sit in 
the dim, smoky little room and look about you. 
It is the most perfect pirate's den you can imagine. 
On the walls hang huge casks and kegs and 
wine bottles in their straw covers, — all the signs 
manual of past and future orgies. Yet the 
" Pirate's Den " is " dry " — straw-dry, brick-dry 
+- 231 -+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

— as dry as the Sahara. If you want a " drink " 
the well-mannered " cut-throat " who serves you 
will give you a mighty mug of ginger ale or 
sarsaparilla. And if you are a real Villager and 
can still play at being a real pirate, you drink it 
without a smile, and solemnly consider it real 
red wine filched at the edge of the cutlass from 
captured merchantmen on the high seas. On the 
big, dark centre table is carefully drawn the map 
of " Treasure Island." 

The pirate who serves you (incidentally he 
writes poetry and helps to edit a magazine among 
other things) apologises for the lack of a Steven- 
sonian parrot. 

" A chap we know is going to bring one back 
from the South Sea Islands," he declares seri- 
ously. " And we are going to teach it to say, 
1 Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! ' " 

If, while you are at the " Pirate's Den " you 
care to climb a rickety, but enchanted staircase 
outside the old building (it's pre-Revolutionary, 
you know) you will come to the " Aladdin Shop " 
— where coffee and Oriental sweets are special- 
ties. It is a riot of strange and beautiful colour — 
vivid and Eastern and utterly intoxicating. A 
very talented and picturesque Villager has painted 
every inch of it himself, including the mysterious- 
looking Arabian gentleman in brilliantly hued 
■+- 232 -*• 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

wood, who sits cross-legged luring you into the 
little place of magic. The wrought iron brackets 
on the wall are patches of vivid tints; the cur- 
tains at the windows are colour-dissonances, fas- 
cinating and bizarre. As usual there is candle- 
light. And, as usual, there is the same delicious 
spirit of seriously and whole-heartedly playing 
the game. While you are there you are in the 
East. If it isn't the East to you, you can go away 
— back to Philistia. 

And speaking of candlelight. I went into the 
poets' favourite " Will o' the Wisp " tea shop 
once and found the gas-jet lighted! The young 
girl in charge jumped up, much embarrassed, and 
turned- it out. 

"I'm so sorry!" she apologised. "But I 
wanted to see just a moment, and lighted it! " 

I peered at her face in the ghostly candle- 
light. It was entirely and unmistakably earnest. 

Just the same, Mrs. Browning's warning that 
" colours seen by candlelight do not look the same 
by day " is not truly applicable to these Village 
shrines. Even under the searching beams of a 
slanting, summer afternoon sun, they are adorable. 
Go and see if you don't believe this. 

Then take the " Mad Hatter's." The entrance 
alone is a monument to the make-believe capa- 
bilities of the Village. Scrawled on the stone 
-j- 233 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

wall beside the steps that lead down to the little 
basement tea room, is an inscription in chalk. 
It looks like anything but English. But if you 
held a looking-glass up to it you would find that 
it is " Down the Rabbit Hole " written backward! 
Now, if you know your " Alice " as well as you 
should, you will recall delightedly her dash after 
the White Rabbit which brought her to Wonder- 
land, and, incidentally, to the Mad Tea Party. 

You go in to the little room where Villagers 
are drinking tea, and the proprietress approaches 
to take your order. She is a good-looking young 
woman dressed in a bizarre red and blue effect, 
not unlike one of the Queens, but she prefers to 
be known as the " Dormouse " — not, however, 
that she shows the slightest tendency to fall asleep. 

On the wall is scribbled, " ' There's plenty of 
room,' said Alice." 

The people around you seem only pleasantly 
mad, not dangerously so. There is a girl with an 
enchanting scrap of a monkey; there is a youth 
with a manuscript and a pile of cigarette butts. 
The great thing here once more is that they are 
taking their little play and their little stage with 
a heavenly seriousness, all of them. You expect 
somebody to produce a set of flamingos at any 
moment and start a game of croquet among the 
tiny tables. 

-»- 234 -?- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

Not all of the Greenwich restaurants have 
definite individual characters to maintain con- 
sistently. Sometimes it is just a general spirit of 
picturesqueness, of adventure, that they are try- 
ing to keep up. The " Mouse Trap," except for 
the trap hanging outside and a mouse scrawled 
in chalk on the wall of the entry, carries out no 
particular suggestion either of traps or mice. 
But take a look at the proprietress (Rita they 
call her), with her gorgeous Titian hair and delft- 
blue apron; at her son Sidney, fair, limp, slim, 
English-voiced, with a deft way of pouring after- 
dinner coffee, and hair the colour of corn. They 
are obviously play-acting and enjoying it. 

Ask Rita her nationality. She will fix you 
with eyes utterly devoid of a twinkle and answer: 
"I? I am part Scotch terrier, and part Spanish 
mongrel, but mostly mermaid! " 

Rita goes to the sideboard to cut someone a 
slice of good-looking pie. She overhears a ref- 
erence to the " Candlestick," a little eating place 
chiefly remarkable for its vegetables and poetesses. 

" If they eat nothing but vegetables no wonder 
they take to poetry," is her comment. But still 
she does not smile. If you giggle, as every child 
knows, you spoil the game. They laugh heartily 
enough and often enough down in the Village, 
but they never laugh at the Village itself, — not 
-j- 235-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

because they take it so reverentially, but because 
they know how to make believe altogether too 
well. 

Let me whisper here that the most fascinating 
hour in the " Mouse Trap " is in the late after- 
noon, when no one is there, and the ebony hand- 
maiden in the big back kitchen is taking the fat, 
delicious-smelling cakes from the oven. Drop in 
some afternoon and sniff the fragrance that sug- 
gests your childhood and " sponge-cake day." 
You will feel that it is a trap no sane mouse 
would ever think of leaving! On a table beside 
you is a slate with, obviously, the day's specials: 

" Spice cakes. 
Chocolate cake. 
Strawberry tarts with whipped cream." 

And still as you peep through the door at the 
back you see more and still more goodies coming 
hot and fresh and enticing from the oven. White 
cakes, golden cakes, delicately browned pies, — 
if you are dieting by any chance you flee tempta- 
tion and leave the " Mouse Trap " behind you. 

It would be impossible to give even an approxi- 
mately complete inventory of the representative 
places of the Village. I have had to content my- 
self with some dozen or so examples, — recorded 

-*- 236 -*- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

almost haphazard, for the most part, but as I 
believe, more or less typical, take them all in 
all, of the Village eating place in its varied and 
rather curious manifestations. 

Then there is a charming shop presided over 
by a pretty girl with the inevitable smock and 
braided hair, where tea is served in order to 
entice you to buy carved and painted trifles. 

And then there is, or was, the place kept by 
Polly's brother, which was heartlessly raided by 
the police, and much maligned, not to say libelled, 
by the newspapers. 

And then there was and is the " Hell Hole." 
Its ancient distinction used to be that it was one 
of the first cheap Bohemian places where women 
could smoke, and that it was always open. When 
all the other resorts closed for the night you re- 
paired to the " Hell Hole." As to the smoking, 
it has taken a good while for New York to allow 
its Bohemian women this privilege, though society 
leaders have enjoyed it for ages. We all know 
that though most fashionable hotels permitted 
their feminine guests to smoke, the Haymarket of 
dubious memory always tabooed the custom to the 
bitter end! 

The " Hell Hole " has always stoutly approved 
of cigarettes, so all honour to it! And many a 
happy small-hours party has brought up there to 
-j- 237 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

top off the night in peace without having to keep 
an eye on the clock. 

There is a little story told about one of these 
restaurants of which I have been writing — never 
mind which. A visiting Englishman on his way 
from his boat to his hotel dropped in at a certain 
place for a drink. He found the company con- 
genial and drifted into a little game which 
further interested him. It was a perfectly 
straight game, and he was a perfectly good sport. 
He stayed there two weeks. No: I shall not state 
what the place was. But I think the story is true. 

Personally, I don't blame the Englishman. 
Even shorn of the charm of a game of chance, 
there is many a place in Greenwich Village 
which might easily capture a susceptible tempera- 
ment — not merely for weeks, but for years! 

The last of the tea shops is the " Wigwam," in 
which, take note, it is the Indian game that is 
played. Its avowed aim is " Tea and Dancing," 
and it is exceedingly proud of its floor. It lives 
in the second story of what, for over fifty years, 
has been the old Sheridan Square Tavern, and its 
proprietors are the Mosses, — poet, editor and in- 
cidental "pirate" on one side of the house; and 
designer of enchanting " art clothes " on the 
other. Lew Kirby Parrish, no less, has made 
the decorations, and he told me that the walls 
-2-238-?- 



RESTAURANTS, AND THE MAGIC DOOR 

were grey with Indian decorations, and the ceil- 
ing a " live colour." I discovered that that meant 
a vivid, happy orange. 

The spirit of the play is always kept in the 
Village. Let us take the opening night of the 
" Wigwam " as a case in point. 

The Indian note is supreme. It is not only the 
splendid line drawings of Indian chiefs, form- 
ing the panels of the room — those mysterious and 
impressive shades created by the imagination of 
Lew Parrish — it is the general mood. Only 
candles are burning, — big, fat candles, giving, in 
the aggregate, a magical radiance. 

The victrola at the end of the room begins to 
play a curious Indian air with an uneven, fas- 
cinating, syncopated rhythm. A graceful girl in 
Indian dress glides in and places a single candle 
on the floor, squatting before it in a circle of 
dim, yellow light. 

She lifts her dark head with its heavy band 
about the brows and shades her eyes with her 
hand. You see remote places, far, pale horizons, 
desert regions of sand. There are empty skies 
overhead, instead of the " live-colour " ceiling. 
With an agile movement, she rises and begins to 
dance about the candle, and you know that to 
her it is a little campfire; it is that to you, too, 
for the moment. Something like the west wind 
-*- 239 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

blows her fringed dress; there is a dream as old 
as life in her eyes. 

Faster and faster she dances about the candle, 
until at last she sinks beside it and with a strange 
sure gesture — puts it out. 

Silence and the dark. The prairie fades. . . . 
The little dark-wood tables with their flowers 
and candles begin to glow again; the next musi- 
cal number is a popular one step! . . . 



240 



Villagers 



CHAPTER VIII 

Villagers 

Although the serious affairs of life are met as conscientiously 
by the man or woman who has the real spirit of the Village, 
nevertheless each of them assuredly shows less of that sordid- 
ness and mad desire for money so prevalent throughout the 
land. . . . 

The real villager's life is better balanced. He produces 
written words of value, or material objects that offer utility 
and delight. He sings his songs. He has a good time. — From 
the Ink Pot (a Greenwich Village paper). 




QUOTED the above to a practical 
friend and he countered by quoting 
Dickens' delightful fraud, " Harold 
Skimpole ": 

" This is where the bird lives and sings! They 
pluck his feathers now and then, and clip his 
wings, but he sings, he sings! . . . Not an am- 
bitious note, but still he sings!" 

And my friend proceeded heartlessly: " l Skim- 
pole ' would have made a perfect Villager!" 

It is hard to answer cold prose when your argu- 
ments are those of warm poetry. Not that prose 

'■+- 243 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

has power to conquer poetry, but that the lan- 
guages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need 
an interpreter and the post is not a sinecure. 

I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on 
these Villagers whom I love and whom I know 
to be as alien to the average metropolitan con- 
sciousness and perception as though they were 
aboriginal representatives of interior and unex- 
plored China. They are perhaps chiefly strange 
because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity. 

The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not par- 
ticularly rare. Many persons have a real love 
for beautiful things, even a real aptitude for de- 
signing or reproducing them. The creative in- 
stinct is something vastly different. Creative 
artists, — great painters or sculptors, great illus- 
trators, and wizards in pencil and pen and char- 
coal effects, — must be both born and made; and 
there are, the gods know, few enough of them, 
all told! Until comparatively recent times, every- 
one gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense 
turned it into a curse by trying to paint, draw or 
model, while the world yawned, laughed, turned 
away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their 
hands to heaven and cried: "What next?" 

But lately, — in many places, but preeminently 
in Greenwich Village, — these folk who love 
art, but can't achieve great art expression, have 

-i~ 244 -h 



VILLAGERS 

evolved a new sort of art life. They are de- 
veloping the embryo of what was the arts-and- 
crafts idea into a really fine, useful and satisfy- 
ing art form. They have left mission furniture 
and Morris designs behind. They are making 
their own models, and making them well. They 
are turning their restless, beauty-loving energies 
into sound, constructive channels. The girl who 
otherwise might have painted atrocious pictures 
is, in the Village, decorating delightful-looking 
boxes and jars, or hammering metals into quaint, 
original shapes that embody her own fleeting 
fancies. The man who wanted to draw but could 
never get his perspective right is carving wood — 
a work where perspective is superfluous — and 
achieving pleasure for others, and comfort and a 
livelihood for himself, at one and the same 
time. 

I know of nothing which is so typical or so 
significant in all the Village as this new urge 
toward good craftsmanship, elementary poetic 
design, — the fundamentals of a utilitarian, beau- 
tiful and pervading art life apart from clay or 
canvas. 

The capitol of the Village shifts a bit from 
time to time, as befits so flexible, so fluid a com- 
munity. Just at the present writing, it is at 
Sheridan Square that you will find it most colour- 
-1-245-*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

fully and picturesquely represented. Tomorrow, 
no man may be able to say whence it has flitted. 

You will find much golden sunshine in Sheri- 
dan Square — not the approved atmosphere of 
Bohemia, yet the real thing nevertheless. It is a 
broad, clean, brazen sort of sunshine — a sunshine 
that should say, "See me work! See me shine! 
See me show up the least last ugliness or small- 
ness or humbleness, and glorify it to something 
Village-like and picturesque!" 

When you leave the sunny square, you will 
enter the oddest little court in all New York; 
it has not to my knowledge any name, but it is 
the general address of enough tea shops and 
studios and Village haunts to stock an entire 
neighbourhood. The buildings are old — old, and, 
of course, of wood. These artist folk have meta- 
morphosed the shabby and dilapidated structures 
into charming places. 

Following the sign of deep blue with yellow 
letters which indicates that this is the place where 
the Hand-Painted Wooden Toys are made, you 
must climb in the sunshine up the outside stair- 
case, which looks as though it had been put up for 
scaffolding purposes and then forgotten. Paus- 
ing on the rickety stairway and looking out be- 
yond the crazy little court and over the drowsy 
Square, you will have a great deal of difficulty 

-*- 246 -J- 







PATCHIN PLACE 

One of the strange little "lost courts" given over to 
the Villagers and their pursuits 



VILLAGERS 

in believing that you left your cable car about 
a minute and a half before. Pass on up the 
stairs. You may nearly fall over the black-and- 
white feline which belongs to no one in any of 
the buildings, but which haunts them all like an 
unquiet ghost, and which is known by everyone as 
the Crazy Cat; so to the door of the studio- 
workshop where the toys are made. 

And have you ever seen anything quite like that 
workshop? 

A little light studio full of colour and the smell 
of paint. On one side blue-green boxes stacked 
on shelves; on the other finished sample toys not 
ready to be boxed. Shallow dishes of orange 
and emerald green and bright pink and primrose 
and black and vivid blue. 
^ " Yes," says the girl who is working there — 
she is fair and wears a pale-green frock and a 
black work-apron, — " I do this part. Mr. Dicker- 
man, the artist, makes the pictures or designs, then 
we have them turned out by the mill. See " — 
she shows queer shaped pieces of wood that sug- 
gest nothing to the casual observer — " Then the 
rest is done here! " 

The room is full of all manner of curious and 

charming playthings. Here is a real pirate's chest 

for your treasures — the young workwoman is 

just painting the yellow nails on it — and here is 

-i- 247 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

a fierce-looking pirate with a cutlass for a book- 
shelf end; here is a futurist coat-hanger — a cubist- 
faced burglar with a jaw and the peremptory 
legend: "Give me your hat, scarf and coat!" 
Here is a neatly capped little waiting maid 
whose arms are constructed for flower holders; 
here are delightful watering-pots, exquisitely 
painted; wonderful cake covers, powder-boxes, 
blotters, brackets; — every single thing a little gem 
of clever design and individual workmanship. It 
is more fascinating than Toyland or Santa Claus' 
shop. These " rocking toys " are particularly 
fascinating: the dreadnought that careens at 
perilous angles, and the kicking mule which 
knocks its driver over as often as you like to 
make it. Shelves on shelves of these wonder- 
things complete, and a whole great table laden 
with them in half-finished forms. Some of the 
little wooden figures are set in a long rack to 
dry, for after the shellac has hardened each colour 
is put on and allowed to dry thoroughly before 
applying the next. The flesh-coloured enamel 
goes on first, then the other lighter shades, leaving 
the darker for the last, and the inevitable touches 
of black to finish off with. 

" This way," says the girl in the black apron 
(which is really a smock), taking up a squat but 
adorable little wooden figure which is already 

■+- 248 -4" 



VILLAGERS 

coloured all over, but has a curiously unfinished 
aspect nevertheless. She fills a tiny brush with 
glittering, black enamel and begins to apply it 
in dots and lines. " This long dab is supposed 
to be his gun. These two little squares of black 
make his belt. One line for his trousers, — now 
he's done. He's for a blotter." 

The little soldier has now taken on character 
and soldidity as though by magic. He grins at 
us, very martial and smart indeed, as he is stood 
in the rack for the enamel to harden. 

No one who has ever been to the workroom of 
one of those art shops will ever forget it. Per- 
sonally I found it more enchanting than any regu- 
lar studio I ever visited. There was quite real 
art there. Remember, those designs show no 
mean order of genius and imagination, and the 
more mechanical work is beautifully done and is 
constantly given a little individual, quaint twist 
which stamps the toys as personal works of art. 
And the whole picture, — I wish I could paint it! 
The low-ceilinged room, set high up above the 
little court; the sunshine and the golden square 
outside; the girl in the black smock and the huge 
table covered with pots and saucers and jars of 
every shape and size; and the vivid splashes of 
colour in the bright afternoon light — scarlet and 
violet and yellow and indigo and red-brown. 

-*- 249 -2- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

And the wall full of strange and brilliant little 
figures grinning, scowling and staring down like 
so many goblins! 

Just as you go out of the studio your eye can 
scarcely fail to fall upon one particular wooden 
hanger to be screwed on a door. If you know 
the " Rose and the Ring " by heart, as you should, 
it will give you quite a shock. It is the image 
of the Doorknocker into which the Fairy Black- 
stick changed the wicked porter GruffanufT! It 
is indeed! 

You know, if all these toys should come to life 
some moonlit night they would make quite a 
formidable array! Imagine the pirates and the 
kicking mules and the cubist burglars all running 
wild together! And there is something uncanny 
about them and their expressions that makes one 
suspect that such an event is more than half 
likely. 

Even the advertisements for such a shop could 
not be commonplace. The artist in charge pro- 
claims that: " Pirates are his specialty, and that 
he will gladly furnish estimates on anything from 
the services of a Pirate Crew to a Treasure Island 
or a Pirate Ship." 

On Washington Square is another sort of work- 
shop, — a place where jewelry is made by hand. 
The girl who does this work draws her own 

-f- 250 -*■ 



VILLAGERS 

designs and executes them, and the results are in- 
finitely quainter and more beautiful than the 
things to be bought at jewelry shops. She buys 
her copper and silver and the little gold she uses 
in bulk; her jewels — semi-precious stones for 
the most part — come from all over the world. 
In her cool, airy workroom with the green trees 
of the big Square outside, this little woman heats 
and bends and bores her metals and shines her 
stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorp- 
tion that is balanced by her steady skill. It is no 
light or easy work, this making of hand-made 
jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable gift of 
delicate fancy and artistic judgment. This girl 
is an artist, not the less so because she makes her 
flowers and dragons and symbolic figures out of 
metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less 
so because her colours do not come in tubes but 
imprisoned in the rare, exotic tints of shimmer- 
ing gems. 

Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver — the 
design is of a water lily, fragile and delicate. 
In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a pale- 
green jewel called peridot. Here is the soft, rich 
blue of lapis lazuli — here the keener azure of 
turquoise matrix. Here is a Mexican opal, full 
of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from 
its burnished-copper setting. What a terrible, 

-fc- 251 -i- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

yet beautiful ornament! One would be, T 
imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell 
while wearing it. Here, cool and pale and pure 
as a moonbeam, is a little water opal, — set in 
silver of course. Here is an " abalone blister," 
iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it 
something of " the shade and the shine of the 
sea " from which the mother-shell originally came. 
Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of 
strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all 
ending in " ite." To model with metal for clay 
— to paint with jewels for colour! Does it 
not sound like very real and very fascinating 
art? 

These are passing glimpses of but two of the 
art industries of the Village. There are many 
others — enough to fill a book all by themselves. 
There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and 
those who carve wood; who make exquisite lace, 
who make furniture of quaint and original design. 
There are the designers and decorators, whose 
brains are full of graceful images and whose 
fingers are quick and facile to carry them out. 
There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of en- 
thusiastic young people — they are nearly all of 
them young — who from sunrise to sunset spend 
their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that 
there is on earth. 

-*- 252 -+■ 



VILLAGERS 

The making of box furniture, for instance, 
sounds commonplace enough, but it is really fas- 
cinating. There are places in the Village, — 
notably one on Greenwich Avenue, — where these 
clever craftsmen make wonderful things from 
cubic forms of wood, from boxes and sticks and 
laths and blocks. They can make anything 
from a desk to a tall candlestick, and, softly 
coloured, the square, wooden objects make a 
highly decorative effect. It is a simple art but 
a striking one, and the aesthetic sense, the instinct 
for balance and proportion and ultimate beauty 
of line and composition, has a splendid 
outlet. 

There is, too, the trade of the designer of gar- 
ments: the word is advisedly substituted for 
dresses. The real designer plans and executes 
pictures, mood-expressions, character settings. 
She dreams herself into the personalities of her 
clients, also the necessities and the limitations! 
Do you think all the artistic costume-creating 
is done in the Rue de la Paix? Try the 
Village! 

And the florists! The flower shops of the 
Village are truly lovely, one in particular, the 
Peculiar Flower Shop, which does not look at all 
like a shop but like the corner of a country 
garden. The Village loves flowers and under- 
-*-253-h 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

stands them. Every Villager who can, grows 
them. Believe me, you know nothing about 
flowers in an intimate sense until you have 
talked with a flower-loving Villager! 

Think of it — you outsiders who imagine that 
you are exhibiting a fine, artistic tendency by 
going to an occasional exhibition, and in knowing 
what colours can discreetly be worn together! 
Here is a small army of vigourous idealists who 
live, breathe and create beauty; whose happy, 
hard-working lives are filled with the exhilarating 
wine of art and artistic expression; who, when 
night comes, never turn the keys of their work- 
shops without the knowledge that they have made 
one more beautiful thing since dawn, one more 
concrete materialisation of the art-dream in man, 
one more new creation to help to furnish pleasure 
for a beauty-loving world! 

There is something about those new forms of 
art work which recalls the richer and more 
leisurely past, when good artisans were scarcely 
less revered than great artists; when men toiled 
half a lifetime to fashion one or two perfect 
things; when even the commonest utilitarian 
articles were expected to be beautiful and were 
made so by the applied genius of a race of work- 
ing artists. It suggests other lands too — the East 
where you will hardly ever see an ugly object, 
-e- 254 -*- 



VILLAGERS 

and where everything from a pitcher to a rug 
is a thing of loveliness; the South where true 
grace of line and colour is the rule rather than 
the exception in the homeliest household utensils. 
Primitive peoples have always stayed close to 
beauty; it is odd that it has always remained for 
civilisation to suggest to man that if a thing is 
useful it need not necessarily be beautiful. In a 
sense, then, our Villagers have returned to a 
simpler, purer and surer standard. In shutting 
out the rest of Philistia they have also succeeded 
in shutting out Philistia's inconceivable ugliness. 
So the gods give them joy — the gods give them 
joy! 

Probably no one region on earth has been more 
misrepresented and miswritten-up than the Vil- 
lage. Its eccentricities, harmless or otherwise, 
are sufficiently conspicuous to furnish targets both 
for the unscrupulous fiction-monger and the pro- 
fessional humourist. Sometimes when the fun is 
clever enough and true enough no one minds, the 
Village least of all; humour is their strong point. 
But they are quite subtle souls with all their child- 
like peculiarities; there is, in their acceptance of 
ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive of the 
"Virginian's" now classic warning: "When you 
call me that, smile!" Hence a novel written 
not long ago and purporting to be a mirror of 
■*- 255-1- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

the Village — Village life and Village ideals, or 
lack of them — had a peculiar result on the real 
Village. They knew it to be untrue — those few 
who read it, that is — but they scorned to notice it. 
They resented it, but to an astonishing extent 
they ignored it. The title of it got to mean very 
little to them save a general term of cheap and 
unmerited opprobrium, like some insulting epi- 
thet in a foreign language which one knows one 
would dislike if one could understand it. It is 
neccessary to grasp these first simple facts to 
appreciated the following episode: 

A certain young Villager — I shall not give his 
name, but he is an artist of growing and striking 
reputation, dark-eyed and rather attractive look- 
ing — burst into a friend's studio pale with anger: 

" See here, have you a copy of ' The Truf- 
flers'?" 

" Not guilty," swore the surprised friend. 
" Why on earth do you want " 

But the young artist had dashed forth again, 
hot upon his quest. A few houses down the street, 
he made another spectacular entrance with the 
same cry; — at another and still another. One 
friend frankly confessed he had never heard of 
the book, another expressed indignation that he 
should be suspected of owning a copy. But not 
until the temperamental, brown-eyed artist had 

-i- 256 -i~ 



VILLAGERS 

visited several acquaintances was he able to get 
what he wanted. 

When the long-sought volume was in his grasp, 
he heaved a sigh of something more emphatic 
than relief. 

" How much did you pay for this thing? " he 
demanded. 

" I didn't. I borrowed it." 

" Oh See here. Can't you say you lost 

it?" 

" I suppose so, if you want it as much as all 
that." 

The young artist sat down and began seriously 
to tear the book to pieces. 

"Well, for the love of Mike!" cried the 
friend. " Do you hate it like that? " 

" I never read more than three pages of it," 
said the artist, steadily tearing, " but a slumming 
creature, a girl from uptown came into the 
1 Pirate's Den ' yesterday where I was sitting, 
and, after staring at me fascinatedly for five 
minutes, leaned over to me and murmured breath- 
lessly: 

" ' Oh, tell me, aren't you a Truffler? ' I 
couldn't wring her neck, and so " 

Another handful of torn pages fluttered from 
his hand. 

Of course, there are always the faddists and 

-*- 257 ~h 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

theorists, who take their ideals as hard as mumps 
or measles. Because the Village is so kind to 
new ideas, these flourish there for a time. 

Here is a little tale told about a certain talented 
and charming lady who had a very complete set 
of theories and wished to try them out on Green- 
wich. One of her pet theories was that The 
People were naturally aesthetic; that The People's 
own untutored instinct would always unerringly 
select the best; that it was an insult to the noble 
idealism of The People to try to educate them; 
they were, so to speak, born with an education, 
ready-made, automatic, in sound working order 
from the beginning. Now, anyone almost may 
have theories, but if they are wise souls they 
won't try to apply them. If they have never 
been practically tested they can't be proved fal- 
lacious and thus may be treasured and loved and 
petted indefinitely, to the comfort of the individ- 
ual and the edification of the multitude. But this 
fair idealist would not let well enough alone. 
She wanted to put her favourite theory to the 
acid test. So this is what she did. 

In the one-time roadhouse on Washington 
Square was a saloon the name of which suggested 
an embryotic impulse toward poetry; or perhaps 
she picked that particular " pub " at random. 
At all events she walked into the bar, put her 

-i- 258 ~i~ 



VILLAGERS 

foot up on the traditional rail and began to con- 
verse with the barkeep. 

She asked him if he had ever seen any of 
Shakespeare's plays, and he said no. She asked 
him if he would like to see one. He said sure — 
he'd try anything once. She invited him to go to 
see " Hamlet " with her, and he said he was 
game. Lest his sensitive feelings be hurt by find- 
ing himself a humble daw among the peacocks 
of the rich, gay world, she bought seats in the 
balcony and wore her shabbiest gown. 

When he called for her she felt slightly faint. 
He was in evening dress, the most impeccable 
evening dress conceivable, even to the pumps and 
the opera hat. He, too, looked a little shocked 
when he saw her. Doubtless he would have asked 
her to dine at Rector's first if she had been prop- 
erly dressed . They both recovered sufficiently 
to go to " Hamlet," and she trembled lest he 
would not like it. She need not have worried — 
or rather she had more cause to worry than she 
knew. Like it? He loved it; he shouted with 
honest mirth from first to last. And, when it was 
over 

" Say," he burst out, " that beats any musical 
comedy show hollow! It's the funniest thing I 
ever see in my life! " 

Henceforward that dear lady did not let her 
-t-259-*- 



1/ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

theories out in a cold world, but kept them safe 
in cotton wool under lock and key. 
\y There are fakers in the Village — just as there 
are fakers everywhere else. Only, of course, the 
ardour of new ideas which sincerely animates 
the Village does lend itself to all manner of 
poses. And because of this a perfectly earnest 
movement will attract a number of superficial 
dilettanti who dabble in it until it is in disrepute. 
And, vice versa, a crassly artificial fad will, by 
its novelty and picturesqueness, draw some of the 
real thinking people. Such inconsistencies and 
discrepancies are bound to occur in any such 
mental crucible as Greenwich. And, moreover, 
if the true and the false get a bit mixed once in 
a way, the wise traveller who goes to learn and 
not to sit in judgment will not look upon it to 
the disadvantage or the disparagement of the 
Village. Young, fervent and courageous souls 
may make a vast quantity of mistakes ere they be 
proved wrong with any sort of sound reasoning. 
If our Villagers run off at tangents on occasion, 
follow a few false gods and tie the cosmos into 
knots, it is, one may take it, rather to their 
credit than otherwise. No one ever accomplished 
anything by sitting still and looking at a wall. 
And it is far better to make a fool of your- 
self with an intense object, than to make nothing 

-*- 260 -*- 



1/ 



VILLAGERS 

of yourself and have no particular object at 
all! 

There are all sorts of fakers — conscious or 
otherwise. There is the futurist, post-impres- 
sionist poseur who more than half believes in his 
own pose. Possibly two small incidents may in- 
dictate what the genuine Villagers think of him. 

There was once a post-impressionist exhibition 
at the Liberal Club, and a certain young man 
who shall be nameless was placed in charge of 
it. He was a perfectly sane young man and he 
knew that many of the " art specimens " hung 
on such occasions were flagrant frauds. Sketch 
after sketch, study after study, was sent in to him 
as master of ceremonies until, in his own words, 
he became so " fed up with post-impressionism 
that he could not stand another daub of the 
stuff!" The worm turned eventually, and he 
vowed to teach those " artists " a short, sweet 
lesson. He knew nothing about painting, being 
a writer by trade, but he had the run of several 
studios and could collect paint as he willed. 
After fortifying himself with a sufficiency of 
Dutch courage, he set up a canvas and painted a 
picture. It had no subject, no lines, no scheme, 
no integral idea. It was just a squareful of paint 
— and it held every shade and variety of paint 
that he could lay his hands on. He says that he 

-*- 26l H- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

took a wicked satisfaction in smearing the colours 
upon that desecrated canvas. His disgust with 
the futurist artists who had submitted their works 
for exhibition was one element to nerve his arm 
and fire his resentful spirit — another was the 
stimulus he had, in sheer desperation, wooed so 
recklessly. When the thing was done it was 
something for angels and devils alike to tremble 
before. It meant nothing, of course, but, like 
many inscrutable and unfathomable things, it 
terrified by its sheer blank, chaotic madness. He 
hung it in the exhibition. And it was — yes, it 
was — the hit of the occasion. This is not a fairy 
tale — not even fiction. The story was told me by 
the culprit — or was it genius? — himself. 

And then people began to talk about it and 
speculate on what its real, inner meaning might 
be. They said it was a " mood picture," a " study 
in soul-tones " and a lot more like that. They 
even asked the guilty man what he thought of it. 
When he coldly responded that he thought it 
" looked like the devil " they told him that, of 
course he would say so: he had no soul for art. 

Now, he had signed this horror, but (let me 
quote him) : " I had signed it in a post-impres- 
sionist style, so no one on the earth could read 
the name." 

After a few days an artist came along who was 
-*- 262 -*■ 



VILLAGERS 

not wholly obsessed with the new craze. He 
studied the thing on the wall, and after a while 
he said: " Someone is guying you. That isn't a 
picture. It's a joke." 

The futurist devotees were indignant, but there 
were enough who were stung by faint suspicion 
to investigate. They studied that signature up- 
side down and under a microscope. After a 
while they got the identity of the man responsible 
for it, and — we draw a veil over the rest! 

Then there was the man — another one — who, 
by way of a cheerful experiment, painted a post- 
impressionist picture with a billiard cue, jabbing 
gaily at the canvas as though trying to make 
difficult screwed shots, caroms and so on. Having 
done his worst in this way, he then took his pic- 
ture to a gallery and exhibited it upside down. 
It attracted much attention and a fair quota of 
praise. 

Stories such as these might discourage one if 
one did not keep remembering that even in far 
deeper and greater affairs of life, " A hair per- 
haps divides the false and true." Who are we 
to improve on Omar's wise and tolerant phil- 
osophy? 

I have less sympathy with the girl who wrote 
poetry, and even occasionally sold it, at so much 
a line. Having sold a poem of eighteen lines 
•+- 263 -+• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

for $9.00 she almost wept because, as she ingenu- 
ously complained, she might just as easily have 
written twenty lines for $10.00! 

Then there is the fair Villager who intones 

Walt Whitman to music of her own composition; 

that is a bit trying, I grant you. And the male 

/Willager who frequents spiritualistic seances and 

communes with dead poets. 

One night Emerson presided. And, after the 
ghosts had departed, the spiritualistic Villager 
read some of his own poems. 

" And do you know," he declared, enraptured, 
" everyone thought it was still Emerson who was 
speaking! " 

Now for him we may have sympathy. He is 
perhaps a faker, but I am inclined to believe that 
he is that anachronism, a sincere faker. He is 
on the level. Like two-thirds of the Village, he 
is playing his game with his whole heart and 
soul, with all that is in him. I am afraid that 
it would be hard to say as much for a certain 
class of outside-the-Village fakers who, from 
time to time, drift into the cheery confines thereof 
and carry away sacks of shekels — though not, let 
us hope, as much as they wanted to get! 

Have you ever heard, for instance, of the psycho- 
analysts? They diagnose soul troubles as regu- 
lar doctors diagnose diseases of the body, and 
-*- 264 -*- 



VILLAGERS 

they are in great demand. Some of them are 
alienists, healers of sick brains; some of them are 
just — fakers. They charge immense prices, and 
just for the moment the blessed Village — always 
passionately hospitable to new cults and theories 
and visions — is receiving them cordially, with 
arms and purses that are both wide open. 

None of us can afford to depreciate the genius 
nor the judgment of Freud, but I defy any Freud- 
alienist to efficiently psychoanalyse the Village! 
By the time he were half done with the job he 
would be a Villager himself and then — pouf! 
That for his psychoanalysis! 

Have you ever read that most enchanting book 
of Celtic mysticism, inconsequent whimsey and 
profound symbolism — " The Crock of Gold " — 
by one James Stevens? The author is not a Vil- 
lager, and his message is one which has its root 
and spring in the signs and wonders of another, 
an older and a more intimately wise land than 
ours. But when I read of those pure, half-pagan 
immortals in the dance of the Sluaige Shee (the 
Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that 
Greenwich Village might well adopt certain pas- 
sages as fitting texts and interpretations of them- 
selves and their own lives — " The lovers of gaiety 
and peace, long defrauded." 

The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey 
-e- 265 -¥• 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

world-dwellers, — or Stevens says they do, and I 
for one believe he knows all there is to know 
about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend) : 

" Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are 
— ye who live among strangers in the houses of 
dismay and self-righteousness. Poor, awkward 
ones! How bewildered and be-devilled ye go! 
... In what prisons are ye flung? To what 
lowliness are ye bowed? How are ye ground 
between the laws and the customs? Come away! 
For the dance has begun lightly, the wind is 
sounding over the hill. ..." 



266 



And Then More Villagers 



CHAPTER IX 

And Then More Villagers 

... A meeting place for the few who are struggling ever 
and ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that 
is not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent 
Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by those 
whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for others to 
obey ... an art, let us say, that springs out of the emotional 
depths of creative spirit, courageous and unafraid of rotting 
power, or limited scope ... an art whose purpose is flaming 
beauty of creation and nothing else. — Harold Hersey, in The 
Quill (Greenwich Village). 

jjjOMEONE said today to the author of 
this book: 

" How can you write about the Vil- 
lage? You don't live here. Live here 
a few years and then perhaps you'll have some- 
thing to say! " 

It is by way of answer that the following little 
tale is quoted; it is an old tale but, after a fashion, 
it seems to fit. 

Once upon a time an explorer discovered a 
country and set about to write a book concerning 
it. Then the people of the country became some- 
what indignant and asked: 
■+- 269 -*• 




GREENWICH VILLAGE 

" Why should a stranger, who has scarcely 
learned his way about in our land, attempt to 
describe it? We, who have lived in it and know 
it, will write its chronicles ourselves." 

So the traveller sat down and shut the book in 
which he had begun to write and said: 

" Well and good. Do you write about your 
country, the land you have lived in so long and 
know so well, and we will see what we shall see." 

So the people of the country — or their scribes, 
a most gifted company — began the task of describ- 
ing that which they knew and loved, and had 
lived in and with since birth. And after they 
were through they took the fruits of their joint 
labours to an assemblage of kings in a far-off place. 

And the kings said, after they had read: 

" This is beautiful literature, but what is the 
country like, — that of which they write?" 

So one of their chamberlains, who was a plain 
soul, said sensibly: 

" Your Majesties, there is only one fault to 
find with the book written by these people about 
their country, and that is that they know it too 
well to describe it well." 

Therefore one of the kings said, " How can that 
be truth? For what we are close to we must see 
more clearly than others who view it from afar." 

So the sensible chamberlain took a certain little 

-J- 270 -ir 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

object and held it close to the eyes of one of 
the kings, and cried, " What is this? " 

And the king, blinking and scowling, said after 
a bit: 

" It is a volcano! " 

The chamberlain answered, "Wrong; it is an 
inkstand," and showing it proved that he spoke 
truth. 

Then he held another thing close before the 
eyes of another king and cried again, " What is 
this?" 

And this king, puzzled, said, " I think it is a 
little piece of cloth." 

" Wrong," said the sensible chamberlain. " It 
is the statue of the Winged Victory." 

And this happened not once but many times un- 
til at length the kings understood. And they made 
a law that no one should stand too close to the 
thing he wished to see clearly. And they added 
their judgment that only the visitors to a country 
could see it as it is. 

So the traveller dipped his quill in ink once 
more and started writing his book. It is not yet 
known how successful he was. 

Travellers make terrible errors, and yet at 

times they bring back fragments of truth that the 

natives of the land have left unheeded scattered 

on the soil of the countryside. Sometimes their 

-j- 271 -j- 



\/ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

fragments prove to be useless and without value, 
for there are travellers and travellers, and some 
will be as stupid and as blind as the rest are 
clever. If this book turns out to be written by 
one of the stupid travellers — try to be generous, 
you Villagers — but then the Village is always 
generous! 

The studio life of Greenwich is really and truly 
as primitive, as picturesque, as poverty-stricken 
and as gaily adventurous as the story-tellers say. 
People really do live in big, quaint, bare rooms 
with scarcely enough to buy the necessaries of 
life; and they are undoubtedly gay in the doing 
of it. There is a sort of camaraderie among the 
" Bohemians " of the world below Fourteenth 
Street which the more restricted uptowners find 
it hard to believe in. It is difficult for those up- 
towners to understand a condition of mind which 
makes it possible for a number of ambitious 
young people in a studio building to go fireless 
and supperless one day and feast gloriously the 
next; to share their rare windfalls without thought 
of obligation on any side; to burn candles instead 
of kerosene in order to dine at " Polly's "; to bor- 
row each other's last pennies for books or pic- 
tures or drawing materials, knowing that they 
will all go without butter or milk for tomorrow's 
breakfast. 

-J- 272 -h 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

If one is hard up, one expects to be offered a 
share in someone's good fortune; if one has had 
luck oneself, one expects, as a matter of course, 
to share it. Such is the code of the studios. 

Anabel, for example, is sitting up typing her 
newest poem at i A.M. when a knock comes on the 
studio door. She opens it to confront the man 
who lives on the top floor and whom she has never 
met. She hasn't the least idea what his name is. 
He carries a tea caddy, a teapot and a teacup. 

" Sorry," he explains casually, " but I saw your 
light, and I thought you'd let me use your gas 
stove to make some tea. Mine is out of commis- 
sion. Just go ahead with your work, while I fuss 
about. Maybe you'd take a cup when it's ready? " 

Anabel does, and he retires, cheerfully uncon- 
scious of anything unconventional in the episode. 

" Jimmy," calls Louise, the fashion illustrator, 
from the front door, one day, " I have to have 
two dollars to pay my gas bill. Got any? " 

" One-sixty," floats down a voice from upstairs. 

" Chuck it down, please. I'll be getting some 
pay tomorrow, and we can blow it in." 

So Jimmy chucks it down. Louise is a nice 
girl, and would merrily " chuck " him the same 
amount if she happened to have it. That's all 
there is to it. 

There is a great deal of nonsense talked about 
■+-273 -J- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

the wickedness or at least the impropriety of 
Greenwich Village — and some of the talk is by- 
people who ought to know better. The Village 
is, to be sure, entirely unconventional and incur- 
ably romantic and dramatic in its tastes. It is 
appallingly honest, dangerously young in spirit 
and it is rather too intense sometimes, keyed up 
unduly with ambition and emotion and the eager- 
ness of living. But wicked? Not a bit of it! 

And the heavenly, inconsequent, infectious, 
absurd gaiety of it! 

The Lady Who Owns the Parrot (Pollypet is 
the bird's name) appears in a new hat; a gor- 
geous, new hat, with a band of scarlet and green 
feathers. 

"Whence the more than Oriental splendour?" 
demands in surprise the Poet from the Third 
Floor, who knows that the Lady is not patronising 
Fifth Avenue shops at present. 

" Pollypet is moulting!" explains the Lady of 
the Parrot, with a laugh. 

Dear, merry, kindly, pitiful life of the studios! 
— irresponsible, perhaps, and not of vast economic 
importance, but so human and so enchanting; so 
warm when it is bitter cold, so rich when the 
larder is empty, so gay when disappointment and 
failure are sitting wolf-like at the door. 

A rich woman who loves the Village and often- 

-i- 274 ~i- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

times goes down there to buy her gifts rather 
than get them from the more conservative places 
uptown, told me that once when she went to a 
Village gift-shop to purchase a number of pres- 
ents, she found the proprietor away. She was 
asked to pick out what she wanted, and make a 
list. She did. Nobody even questioned her 
accuracy. The next time she went she had a 
friend with her, who was, I imagine, more or 
less thrilled by the notion of approaching the 
bad, bold city, — she was from out of town. The 
shopkeeper was out in the back garden dressed in 
blue overalls and shirt, hoeing vigorously. 

" Is this the heart of Bohemia? " demanded the 
astonished provincial. 

After their purchases were made and done 
up, they wanted twine. Don't forget, please, that 
this was a shop. 

" Twine? " murmured the picturesque pro- 
prietor gently. "Of course I should have some; 
I must remember to get some twine!" 

The sympathies are always ready there, the 
pennies too, when there are any! A lame man, 
a sick woman, a little child, a forlorn dog or 
cat, — they have only to go and sit on the steps 
of one of those blessed studio buildings, to receive 
pity, help and cheer. And — ye gods! — isn't the 
fact well known! And isn't it taken advantage of, 
-*- 275 -?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

just! The swift, unreasoning charity of these 
Bohemians is so well recognised that it is a regu- 
lar graft for the unscrupulous. 

But they keep right on being cheated right and 
left; thank heaven, they will never learn to be 
wiser! 

This difference between the Village view and 
the conventional standpoint is very difficult to 
analyse. It really can only be made clear by 
examples. As, for instance: 

It is fairly late in the evening. In one of the 
little tea shops is a group of girls and men smok- 
ing. To them enters a youth, who is hailed with 
" How is Dickey's neuralgia? " 

The newcomer grins and answers: "Better, I 
guess. He's had six drinks, and is now asleep 
upstairs on Eleanore's couch. He'll be all right 
when he wakes up." 

They laugh, but quite sympathetically, and the 
subject is dismissed. 

Now, there is a noteworthy point in this trifling 
episode, though it may appear a trifle obscure at 
first. There is, to be sure, nothing especially in- 
teresting or edifying in the fact of a young man's 
drinking himself into insensibility to dull a face- 
ache; the thing has been known before. Neither 
is it an unheard-of occurrence for a friendly 
and charitably inclined woman to grant him 
■+- 276 -r 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

harbour room till he has slept it off. The only 
striking point about this is that it is taken so 
entirely as a matter of course by the Villagers. 
It no more astonishes them that Eleanore should 
give up her couch to a male acquaintance for an 
indefinite number of night hours, than that she 
should give him a cup of tea. It is entirely the 
proper, kindly thing to do; if Eleanore had not 
done it, she would not be a Villager, and the 
Village would have none of her. 

It may be further remarked that, if you should 
go upstairs to Eleanore's studio, you would find 
that she takes the presence on the couch as calmly 
as though it were a bundle of laundry. She is 
in no sense disconcerted by the occasional snore 
that wakes the midnight echoes. She works 
peacefully on at the black-and-white poster which 
she is going to submit tomorrow. She does not 
resent Dickey at all. Neither does she watch his 
slumbers tenderly nor hover over him in the ap- 
proved manner. Eleanore is not the least bit 
sentimental, — few Villagers are. They are merely 
romantic and kindly, which are different and 
sturdier graces. 

Toward morning Dickey will wake and Elea- 
nore will make him black coffee and send him 
home. And there will be the end of that. 

Conceive such a situation on the outside! 
-*- 277 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Imagine the feminine flutter of the conventional 
Julia. Fancy, above all, the hungry gossip of 
conventional Julia's conventional friends! But 
in the Village there is very little scandal, and 
practically no slander. They are very slow to 
think evil. 

And this in spite of their rather ridiculous way 
of talking. They do, a number of them, give the 
uninitiated an impression of moral laxity. Their 
phrases, " the free relation," " the rights of sex," 
" suppressed desires," " love without bonds," " lib- 
erty of the individual " do, when jumbled up 
sufficiently, make a composite picture of strange 
and lurid aspect. But actually, they are not one 
atom less moral than any other group of human 
beings, — in fact, thanks to their unquestionable 
ideals and their habit of fearless thinking, they 
are, I think, a good bit more so.!/' 

" While I lived in the Village," writes one 
shrewd man, " I heard of more impropriety and 
saw less of it than anywhere I've ever been! " 

Here is another glimpse: 

The casual visitor to one of the basement 
" shops " climbs down the steep steps and pauses 
at the door to look at the picture. It is rather 
early, and only two customers have turned up so 
far. They are sitting in deep, comfortable chairs 
smoking and drinking (as usual, ginger-ale). 

-*- 278 -j- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

One of the proprietors — a charmingly pretty girl 
— is sweeping, preparatory to the evening " trade." 
When her husband comes in she is going to leave 
him in charge and go to the Liberal Club for a 
dance, so she is exquisitely dressed in a peach- 
coloured gown, open of neck and short of sleeve. 
She is slim and graceful and her bright-brown 
hair is cropped in the Village mode. She is the 
most attractive maid-of-all-work that the two 
" customers " have ever seen. When, pausing in 
her labours, she offers them her own cigarette 
case with the genuine simplicity and grace of a 
child offering sweetmeats, their subjugation is 
complete. Though they are strangers in a strange 
land — they have only dropped in to find out an 
address of a friend who lives in the Village — 
they never misunderstand the situation, their 
hostess nor the atmosphere for a moment. No 
one misunderstands the charming, picturesque 
camaraderie of the Village — unless they have 
been reading Village novelists, that breed held 
in contempt by Harry Kemp and all the Green- 
wichers. Anyone who goes there with an open 
mind will carry it away filled with nothing but 
good things — save sometimes perhaps a little envy. 
And, by the bye, that habit of calling at strange 
places to locate people is emphatically a Village 
custom. Or rather, perhaps, it should be put the 

■4- 279 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

other way: the habit of giving some "shop" or 
eating place instead of a regular address is most 
prevalent among Villagers. A Villager is seldom 
in his own quarters unless he has a shop of his 
own. But if he really " belongs " he is known 
to hundreds of other people, and the enquiring 
caller will be passed along from one place to 
another, until, in time, he will be almost certain 
to locate his nomadic friend. 

"Billy Robinson? Why, yes, of course, we 
know him. No, he hasn't been in tonight. But 
you try some of the other places that he goes to. 
He's very apt to drop in at the ' Klicket ' during 
the evening. Or if he isn't there try ' The Mad 
Hatter's,' — 'Down the Rabbit Hole' you know; 
— or let's see — he'll be sure to show up at the 
Club some time before midnight. If you don't 
find him come back here; maybe he'll drop in 
later, or else someone will who has seen him." 

Of course, he is found eventually, — usually 
quite soon, for the Village is a small place, and a 
true Village in its neighbourliness and its readi- 
ness to pass a message along. 

Really, there is nothing quainter about it than 
this intimate and casual quality, such as is known 
in genuine, small country towns. Fancy a part of 
New York City — Gotham, the cold, the selfish, 
the unneighbourly, the indifferent — in which 

-i- 280 -f- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

everyone knows everyone else and takes a per- 
sonal interest in them too; where distances are 
slight and pleasant, where young men in loose 
shirts with rolled-up sleeves, or girls hatless and 
in working smocks stroll across Sixth Avenue 
from one square to another with as little self- 
consciousness as though they were meandering 
down Main Street to a game of tennis or the 
village store! Sixth Avenue, indeed, has come 
to mean nothing more to them than a rustic 
bridge or a barbed-wire fence, — something to 
be gotten over speedily and forgotten. They even, 
by some alchemy of view point, seem to give it a 
rural air from JefTerson Market down to Fourth 
Street — these cool-looking, hatless young people 
who make their leisurely way down Washington 
Place or along Fourth Street. People pass them, 
— people in hats, coats and carrying bundles; but 
the Villagers do not notice them. They do not 
even look at them pityingly; they do not look at 
them at all. Your true Green-Village denizen 
does not like to look at unattractive objects if he 
can possibly avoid it. 

Of course, they do make use of Sixth Avenue 
occasionally, on their rare trips uptown. But it 
is in the same spirit that a country dweller would 
take the railway in order to get into the city on 
necessary business. As a matter of fact there is 
-e- 281 -e- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

no corner of New York more conveniently sit- 
uated for transportation than this particular sec- 
tion of Greenwich. I came across a picturesque 
real estate advertisement the other day: 

" If you ever decide to kill your barber and 
fly the country, commit the crime at the corner 
of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. There is 
probably no other place in the world that offers 
as many avenues of flight." 

But nothing short of dire necessity ever takes a 
Villager uptown. He, or she, may go down- 
town but not up. Uptown nearly always means 
something distasteful and boring to the Village; 
they see to it that they have as few occasions for 
going there as possible. 

Anyway, uptown, for them, ends very far down- 
town! The fifties, forties, thirties, even the twen- 
ties, are to them the veritable wilderness, the 
variously repugnant sections of relatively outer 
darkness. 

Do you remember Colonel Turnbull who had 
so much trouble in selling his house at Eighth 
Street because it was so far out of town? Here 
is a modern and quite surprisingly neat analogy: 

Two Village women of my acquaintance met 
the other day. Said one tragically: " My dear, 
■+- 282-?- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

isn't it awful? We've had to move uptown! 
Since the baby came, we need a larger house, 
but it almost breaks my heart!" 

" I should think so! " gasped the second woman 
in consternation. " You've always been such 
regular Villagers. What shall we do without 
you? It's terrible! Where are you moving to, 
dear?" 

" — West Eleventh Street!" sobbed the sad, 
prospective exile. 

There are Villagers who while scarcely celeb- 
rities are characters so well known, locally, as to 
stand out in bizarre relief even against that varie- 
gated background of personalities. There is 
Doris, the dancer, slim, strange, agile, with a 
genius for the centre of the Bohemian stage, an 
expert, exotic style of dancing, and a singular and 
touching passion for her only child. At the 
Greenwich masquerades she used to shine re- 
splendent, her beautiful, lithe body glorious with 
stage-jewels, and not much else; for the time 
being she has flitted away, but some day she will 
surely return like a darkly brilliant butterfly, and 
the Village will again thrill to her dancing. 
There is Hyppolite, the anarchist, dark and 
fervid ; there is " Bobby " Edwards, the Village 
troubadour, with his self-made and self-decorated 
ukelele, and his cat, Dirty Joe; there is Charlie — 
-e- 283 -+■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

immortal barber! — whose trade is plied in sublime 
accordance with Village standards, and whose 
" ad " runs as follows: 

" The only barber shop in the Village where 
work is done conforming to its ideals. . . . Four 
barbers in attendance supervised by the popular 
boy-proprietor— CHARLIE." 

There is Peggy, the artist's model, who has 
posed for almost every artist of note, and who is 
as pretty as a pink carnation. 

There is Tiny Tim — of immense proportions 
— who keeps the Tiny Tim Candy Shop; an 
impressive person who carries trays of candy 
about the Village, and who swears that he has 
sweets to match your every mood. 

" If they don't express your character, I'll 
take them back!" he declares. Though how he 
could take them back. . . . However, in the 
Village you need not be too exact. There is 
" Ted " Peck's Treasure Box. Here all manner 
of charming things are sold; and here Florence 
Beales exhibits her most exquisite studies in 
photography. 

There is the strong-minded young woman, who 
is always starting clubs; there is the Osage Indian 
who speaks eight languages and draws like a god; 

+- 284 -+• 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

there are a hundred and one familiar spirits of 
the Village, eccentric, inasmuch as they are un- 
like the rest of the world, but oh, believe me, a 
goodly company to have as neighbours. 

People have three mouthpieces, three vehicles 
of expression, besides their own lips. We are 
not talking now about that self-expression which 
is to be found in individual act or word in any 
form. We are speaking in a more practical and 
also a more social sense. In this sense we may 
cite three distinct ways in which a community 
may become articulate: through its press; through 
its clubs or associations; through its entertain- 
ments and social life. Greenwich has a number 
of magazines, an even larger number of clubs 
and an unconscionable number of ways of enter- 
taining itself — from theatrical companies to balls! 

Of course the best known of the Greenwich 
magazines is The Masses, owned by Max East- 
man and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a 
sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it 
now circulates all over the country, wherever 
socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be 
found. But its inception was in Greenwich Vil- 
lage, and in its infant days it strongly reflected 
the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was 
just beginning to ferment in the world below 
Fourteenth Street. In those days it was poor and 

-*- 285 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

struggling too (as is altogether fitting in a Vil- 
lage paper) and lost nothing in freshness and 
spontaneity and vigour from that fact. 

" You might tell," said Floyd Dell, with a 
twinkle, " of the days when The Masses was in 
Greenwich Avenue, and the editor, the business 
manager and the stenographer played ball in the 
street all day long! " 

It is, perhaps, symbolic that The Masses in 
moving uptown stopped at Fourteenth Street, the 
traditional and permanent boundary line. There 
it may reach out and touch the great world, yet 
still remain part of the Village where it was 
born. 

Here is one man's views of the Liberal Club. 
I am half afraid to quote them, they sound so 
heretical, but I wish to emphasise the fact that 
they are quoted. They might be the snapping 
of the fox at the sour grapes for all I know! 
Though this particular man seemed calm and 
dispassionate. " The Liberal Club Board," he 
said, " is a purely autocratic institution. It is 
collectively a trained poodle, though composed 
of nine members. The procedure is to make a 
few long speeches, praise the club, and re-elect 
the Board. Perfectly simple. But — did you say 
Liberal Club?" He used to sit on the Board 
himself, too! 

-t- 286 -?- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

A visiting Scotch socialist proclaimed it, with- 
out passion, a " hell of a place," and some of its 
most striking anarchistic leaders, " vera interestin' 
but terrible damn fools "! But he was, doubtless, 
an eccentric though an experienced and dyed-in- 
the-wool socialist who had lectured over half the 
globe. It is recorded of him that once when 
a certain young and energetic Village editor had 
been holding forth uninterruptedly and dra- 
matically for an hour on the rights of the work- 
ing-man, etc., etc., the visiting socialist, who had 
been watching his fervent gesticulations with 
absorbed attention, suddenly leaned forward and 
seized the lapel of his coat. 

"Mon!" he exclaimed earnesly, "do ye play 
tennis? " 

Just what is the Liberal Club? 

You may have contradictory answers commen- 
surate with the number of members you interro- 
gate. One will tell you that it is a fake; one 
that it is the only vehicle of free speech; Arthur 
Moss says it is " the most //-liberal club in the 
world"! Floyd Dell says it is paramountly a 
medium for entertainment, and that it is " not 
so much a clearing house of new ideas as of new 
people "! 

The Liberal Club goes up, and the Liberal 
Club goes down. It has its good seasons and its 
-*- 287 -j- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

bad, its fluctuations as to standards and favour, 
its share in the curious and inevitable tides that 
swing all associations back and forth like pendu- 
lums. 

There is a real passion for dancing in the 
Village, and it is beautiful dancing that shows 
practice and a natural sense of rhythm. The 
music may be only from a victrola or a piano in 
need of tuning, but the spirit is, most surely, 
the vital spirit of the dance. At the Liberal Club 
everyone dances. After you have passed through 
the lounge room — the conventional outpost of the 
club, with desks and tables and chairs and prints 
and so on — you find yourself in a corridor with 
long seats, and windows opening on to Nora Van 
Leuwen's big, bare, picturesque Dutch Oven 
downstairs. On the other side of the corridor is 
the dance room — also the latest exhibition. Some 
of the pictures are very queer indeed. The last 
lot I saw were compositions in deadly tones of 
magenta and purple. The artist was a tall young 
man, the son of a famous illustrator. He strolled 
in quite tranquilly for a dance, — with those things 
of his in full view! All the courage is not on 
battlefields. 

Said a girl, who, Village-like, would not per- 
jure her soul to be polite: 

"Why so much magenta?" 
-j- 288-?- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

And said he quite sweetly: 

" Why not? I can paint people green if I 
like, can't I?" 

With which he glided imp erturb ably off in a 
fox trot with a girl in an " art sweater." 

Harry Kemp says: " They make us sick with 
their scurrilous, ignorant stories of the Village. 
Pose? Sure! — it's two-thirds pose. But the rest 
is beautiful. And even the pose is beautiful in its 
way. Life is rotten and beautiful both at once. 
So is the Village. The Village is big in idea and 
it's growing. They talk of its being a dead letter. 
It's just beginning. First it — the Village, as it is 
now — was really a sort of off-shoot of London and 
Paris. Now it's itself and I tell you it's beautiful, 
and more remarkable than people know. 

" Uptowners, outsiders, come in here and in- 
sist on getting in; and, fed on the sort of false stuff 
that goes out through ' novelists ' and * reporters,' 
think that anything will go in the Liberal Club! 
They come here and insult the women members, 
and we all end up in a free fight every week or 
so. All the fault of the writers who got us wrong 
in the first place, and handed on the wrong im- 
pression to the world. . . ." 

The studio quarters of the Village are located 
in various places — the South Side of Washington 
Square, the little lost courts and streets and cor- 
-*- 289 -?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

ners everywhere, and — Macdougal Alley, Wash- 
ington Mews, and the new, rather stately struc- 
tures on Eighth Street, which are almost too 
grand for real artists and yet which have at- 
tracted more than a few nevertheless. I suppose 
that the Alley, — jutting off from the famous 
street named for Alexander Macdougal, — is the 
best known. 

I remember that once, some years ago, I was 
hurrying, by a short cut, from Eighth Street to 
Waverly Place, and saw something which made 
me stop short in amazement. As unexpectedly 
as though it had suddenly sprung there, I beheld 
a little street running at right angles from me, 
parallel with Eighth, but ending, like a cul de sac, 
in houses like those with which it was edged. It 
was a quaint and foreign-looking little street and 
seemed entirely out of place in New York, — 
and especially out of place plunged like that into 
the middle of a block. 

But that was not the oddest part of it. In that 
street stood talking a girl in gorgeous Spanish 
dress and a man in Moorish costume. The warm 
reds and greens and russets of their garments 
made an unbelievable patch of colour in the 
grey March day. And this in New York! 

A friendly truck driver, feeding his horses, 
saw my bewilderment, and laughed. 

-i- 290 -J- 




A GREENWICH STUDIO 

- Choosing models 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

" That's Macdougal's Alley," he volunteered. 

That meant nothing to me then. 

" What is it? " I demanded, devoured by curi- 
osity; " the stage door of a theatre, — or what?" 

He laughed again. 

"It is just Macdougal's Alley!" he repeated, 
as though that explained everything. 

So it did, when I came to find out about it. 

The Alley and Washington Mews are prob- 
ably the most famous artist quarters in the city, 
and some of our biggest painters and sculptors 
once had studios in one or the other, — those, 
that is, that haven't them still. Of course the 
picturesquely attired individuals I had caught 
sight of were models — taking the air, or snatching 
a moment for flirtation. Naturally they would 
not have appeared in costume in any other street 
in New York, but this, you see, was Macdougal 
Alley, and as my friend, the truck driver, seemed 
to think, that explains everything! 

As for the Mews, they are fixing it up in great 
shape; and as for those Eighth-Street studios, they 
are too beautiful for words. You look out on 
Italian gardens, and you know that you are no- 
where near New York, with its prose and drudg- 
ery. If for a moment it seems all a bit too per- 
fect for the haphazard, inspirational loveliness of 
the Village, you will surely have an arresting in- 
-*- 291 -*- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

stinct which will tell you that it is just consum- 
mating a Village dream; it is just making what 
every Villager lives to make come true: perfect 
artistic beauty. 

As we have seen, dancing is a real passion in 
the Village. So we can scarcely leave it without 
touching on the " Village dances " which have 
been so striking a feature of recent times and 
have proved so useful and so fruitful to the tired 
Sunday-supplement newspaperman. There are 
various sorts, from the regular pageants staged 
by the Liberal Club and the Kit Kat, to those of 
more modest pretensions given by individual 
Villagers or groups of Villagers. 

The Quatres Arts balls of Paris doubtless 
formed the basis for these affairs; indeed, a de- 
scription given me years ago by William Dodge, 
the artist, might almost serve as the story of one 
of these Village balls today. And Doris, who, 
I believe, appeared on one occasion as 
"Aphrodite," — in appropriate "costume" — re- 
calls the celebrated model Sara Brown who 
electrified Paris by her impersonation of 
" Cleopatra " at a " Quatz 'Arts " gathering, — 
somewhat similarly arrayed, — or should we say 
decorated? 

The costumes, — many of them at least, — are 
largely — paint! This is not nearly as improper 
-t- 292 -*- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

as it sounds. Splashes of clever red and subtle 
purple will quite creditably take the place of 
more cumberous and expensive dressing, — or at 
least will pleasantly eke it out. Colour has long 
been recognised as a perfectly good substitute for 
cloth. Have you forgotten the small boy's ab- 
stract of the first history book — " . . . The early 
Britons wore animals' skins in winter, and in 
summer they painted themselves blue." I am con- 
vinced that wode was the forerunner of the dress 
of the Village ball! 

The Kit Kat, an artists' association, is remark- 
able for one curious custom. Its managing board 
is a profound mystery. No one knows who is 
responsible for the invitations sent out, so there 
can be no jealousy nor rancour if people don't 
get asked. If an invited guest chooses to bring a 
friend he may, but he is solely responsible for 
that friend and if his charge proves undesirable 
he will be held accountable and will thereafter 
be quietly dropped from the guest list of subse- 
quent balls. And still he will never know who 
has done it! Hence, the Kit Kat is a most 
formidable institution, and invitations from 
its mysterious " Board " are hungrily longed 
for! 

Every season there are other balls, too; among 
the last was the " Apes and Ivory " affair, a study 
-J-293-?- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

in black and white, as may be gathered; then 
there was the " Rogue's Funeral " ball. This 
was to commemorate the demise of a certain little 
magazine called the Rogue, whose career was 
short and unsuccessful. They kept the funeral 
atmosphere so far as to hire a hearse for the trans- 
portation of some of the guests, but 

" We put the first three letters of funeral 
in capitals," says one of the participants cas- 
ually. 

The proper thing, when festivities are over, is 
to go to breakfast, — at " Polly's," the Village 
Kitchen or the Dutch Oven, perhaps. Of course, 
nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric 
vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; 
but then, the Village is young; it is preeminently 
the land of youth, and the wine of life is still 
fresh and strong enough in its veins to come 
buoyantly through what seems to an older con- 
sciousness a good bit more like an ordeal than an 
amusement! 

And yet — and yet — somehow I cannot think 
that these balls and pageants and breakfasts are 
truly typical of the real Village — I mean the 
newest and the best Village — the Village which, 
like the Fairy Host, sings to the sojourners of 
the grey world to come and join them in their 
dance, with " the wind sounding over the hill." 

-f- 294 -4- 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

My Village is something fresher and gayer and 
more child-like than that. There is in it nothing 
of decadence. 

But, as John Reed says — 

". . . There's ancemia 
Ev'n in Bohemia, 
That there's not more of it — there is the miracle/ " 

For still the Village is, or has been, inarticu- 
late. Individually it has found speech — it has 
expressed itself in diverse and successful forms. 
But there remains a void of voices! A com- 
munity must strongly utter something, and must 
find mouths and mouthpieces for the purpose. 
It was hard to find, hard to locate, hard to vocal- 
ise, this message of the Village; eventually it 
came up from the depths and pitched its tone 
bravely and sweetly, so that men might hear and 
understand. 

The need was for something concrete and yet 
varied, which could cry out alone, — a delicious 
voice in the wilderness, if you like! There have 
been play-acting companies, " The Washington 
Square Players," " The Provincetown Players," 
and others. But something was still want- 
ing. 

Sometimes it strikes us that wonderful things 
-*-295-h- 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

happen haphazard like meteors and miracles. 
But I believe if we could take the time to in- 
vestigate, we would find that most of these 
miraculous and glorious oaks grow out of a 
quiet commonplace acorn. 

Richard Wagner once held an idea — perhaps 
it would better be termed an ideal — concerning 
art expression. He declared (you may read it in 
" Oper und Drama " unless you are too war- 
sided) that all the art forms belonged together: 
that no one branch of the perfect art form could 
live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral 
parts. He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) 
that all the arts were akin: that the brains which 
created music, drama, colour effects, plastic 
sculptural effects — anything and everything that 
belonged to artistic expression — were, or should 
be, welded into one supreme artistic expression. 
He believed this implicitly, and like other persons 
who believe well enough, he " got away with it." 
In Bayreuth, he established for all time a 
form of synthetic art which has never been 
rivalled. 

Now Wagner has very little apparently to do 
with Greenwich Village. And yet this big world- 
notion is gaining way there. They are finding — 
as anyone must have known they would find — a 
new mood expression, a new voice. And, wise, 

-*- 296 -h 



AND THEN MORE VILLAGERS 

not in their generation, but in all the generations, 
the Village has seized on this new vehicle with 
characteristic energy. 

The new Greenwich Village Theatre which 
Mrs. Sam Lewis is godmothering, is — unless 
many sensible and farseeing persons are much 
mistaken — going to be the new Voice of the 
Village. It is going to express what the Villagers 
themselves are working for, day and night: 
beauty, truth, liberty, novelty, drama. It is 
going, in its theatrical form, to fill the need 
for something concrete and yet various, something 
involving all, yet evolved from all; something 
which shall somehow unite all the scattered rain- 
bow filaments of Our Village into a lovely tex- 
ture with a design that even a Philistine world 
can understand. 

" Young, new American playwrights first," 
says Mrs. Lewis. "After that as many great 
plays of all kinds as we can find. But we want 
to open the channel for expression. We want to 
give the Village a voice." 

And when she says the Village she does not 
mean just the section technically known as Green- 
wich. She means — I take it — that greater neigh- 
bourhood of the world, which is fervently con- 
cerned in the new and thrilling and wonderful 
and untrammelled things of life. They have no 
-*- 297 -+ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

place to sing, out in the everyday world, but in 
the Village they are going to be heard. 

And I think the new Greenwich Village 
Theatre is going to be one of their most resonant 
mouthpieces! 



298 



A LAST WORD 

And after all this, — what of the Village? Just 
what is it? 

" In my experience," said the writing man of 
sententious sayings, " there have been a dozen 
' villages.' The Village changes are like the 
waves of the sea! " 

Interrogated further, he mentioned various 
phases which Greenwich had known. The studio- 
and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and 
anarchy era, the futurist fad, the " free love " 
cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball period, 
the psychoanalysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, 
the arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting 
mania; and other violent and more or less transient 
enthusiasms which had possessed the Village dur- 
ing the years he had lived there. Not wholly 
transient, he admitted. Something of each and all 
of them had remained — had stuck — as he ex- 
pressed it. The Village assimilates ideas with 
miraculous speed; it gobbles them up, gets strong 
and well on the diet, and asks for more. It is so 
eager for novelty and new ideals and new view- 
points that if nothing entirely virgin comes along, 
■*- 299 -#■ 



GREENWICH VILLAGE 

it will take something quite old, and give it a 
new twist and adopt it with Village-like ardour. 

Oh, you mustn't laugh at the Village, you wise 
uptowners, — or if you laugh it must be very, very 
gently and kindly, as you laugh at children; and 
rather reverently, too, in the knowledge that in 
lots of essentials the children know ever so much 
more than you do! 

It is true that changes do come over the Vil- 
lage like the waves of the sea, even as my friend 
said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic 
waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, 
carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and 
glittering shells and now and then a pearl. The 
Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; 
never a phase touches it but leaves it the richer 
for the contact. 

You, too, going down into this port o' dreams 
will win something of the wealth that is of 
the heart and soul and mind. You will come 
away with the sense of wider horizons and 
deeper penetrations than you knew before. You 
will find novel colours in the work-a-day world 
and a sort of quaint music in the song of the city. 
Some of the glowing reds and greens and purples 
that you saw those grown-up children in the 
Village joyously splashing on their wooden toys 
or the walls of their absurd and charming 

-*- 300 -*■ 



A LAST WORD 

" shops " will somehow get into the grey fabric 
of your life; and a certain eager urging under- 
tone of idealism and hope and sturdy aspiration 
will make you restless as you follow your com- 
mon round. Perhaps you will go back. Perhaps 
you will keep it as a rainbow memory, a visual- 
isation of the make-believe country where any- 
thing is possible. But in any case you will not 
forget. 

Many a place gets into your mind and creates 
nostalgia when you are far from it. But Green- 
wich Village gets into your heart, and you will 
never be quite able to lose the magic of it all 
the days of your life. 



THE END 



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